Nigerian girl’s period must never become punishment

A girl’s first period should not arrive as a humiliation.  It should not begin with panic in a classroom, a sweater tied tightly around the waist, or the terror of a stain spreading across a school uniform.  It should not be greeted by silence, shame and the sudden discovery that the world has rules for […]

A girl’s first period should not arrive as a humiliation.

 It should not begin with panic in a classroom, a sweater tied tightly around the waist, or the terror of a stain spreading across a school uniform. 

It should not be greeted by silence, shame and the sudden discovery that the world has rules for her body that nobody thought to explain. And yet, for too many girls in Nigeria, this is exactly how menstruation begins: not as a fact of life, but as a private ordeal.

I know something about that fear. 

I have spoken publicly about hiding my first period out of fear. 

It is a memory that has stayed with me for years, not because menstruation is shameful, but because the shame around it was made to feel natural. It was inherited, rehearsed and enforced.

We recently asked a simple question through our Menstrual Hygiene Day campaign: My First Period: What Could Have Been Different? The answer is painful in its simplicity. Almost everything.

Ahead of Menstrual Hygiene Day, Nigeria must stop speaking about menstruation as though it belongs only in whispers. 

Menstrual health is not a side issue. It is not an annual talking point to be dusted off every May and forgotten by June. It sits at the centre of dignity, education, public health and equal citizenship. 

A country that claims to care about girls cannot remain indifferent to the monthly realities that push them out of class, out of confidence and, sometimes, out of opportunity. The evidence is too stark to ignore. 

A recent assessment of menstrual health and hygiene in Nigeria found that 26 per cent of girls did not know about menstruation before their first period. Only 19 per cent received menstrual health education in school. Around 30 per cent reported that their schools lacked private latrines or spaces where girls could change menstrual materials. 

Only nine per cent reported the availability of bins for menstrual waste in girls’ toilets. 

A quarter of adolescent girls and women aged 15 to 49 said they missed work or school during menstruation. This is not a marginal discomfort. 

It is structural exclusion, repeated every month, on a national scale.

Then there is the cruelty of cost, in parts of northeastern Nigeria, 62 per cent of women and girls reported lacking the money to buy menstrual materials during their last period. 

The same assessment revealed a brutal inequality in access: 85 per cent of women in Lagos said they had what they needed to manage menstruation, while only 37 per cent said the same in Kaduna.

We should sit with that disparity. It tells us that menstrual dignity in Nigeria is still being rationed by geography and income. For millions of girls, a period is not merely a cycle. 

It is a monthly negotiation with poverty.

What does that negotiation look like in real life? It looks like girls staying home because they are afraid of ridicule. 

It looks like improvised materials used in desperation because proper products are unaffordable. 

It looks like pain managed in silence because there is no support, no information and no sympathy. It looks like a girl spending more energy hiding her body than using her mind. 

We are fond of saying that the girl-child is the future. But the future sounds hollow to a child who cannot find a clean toilet, soap, water or a pad in the present.

A 2024 systematic review found that fewer than half of girls knew about menstruation before menarche. Many described fear, embarrassment, pain and school absence.

The barriers were painfully consistent: poor access to sanitary materials, inadequate toilets, unsafe disposal options, cultural silence and misinformation in the home and at school.

We must stop flattering ourselves by calling this silence culture. Culture that leaves a girl frightened by her own body is not protection. 

It is abandonment dressed up as tradition. And yet the solution is neither mysterious nor impossible. UNICEF’s work in Benue State has shown what changes when the basics are provided. 

Girls reported being able to stay in school during their periods because their schools had clean toilets, water and soap. 

One girl said plainly that there was no excuse for her to miss class when those facilities were available. 

There, in one sentence, is the scandal of our neglect. If something as basic as privacy, water and cleanliness can preserve a girl’s attendance and confidence, why have we tolerated their absence for so long? Nigeria has, at last, begun to move. 

In 2025, the Federal Government adopted the country’s first National Policy on Menstrual Health and Hygiene Management, with a vision that by 2030 no girl should have to choose between managing her menstruation and pursuing her education. That is welcome, it is necessary. 

It is long overdue. But policy language, however noble, does not clean toilets, stock health rooms, train teachers or lower the price of pads. A validated document is not the same thing as a changed life. 

The danger now is that we congratulate ourselves for recognition when what girls need is implementation. So let us be honest about what must come next. Menstrual health must move from ceremony to budget.

Every state government should treat it as a core governance obligation, not a charitable extra. Public schools should have clean, private, sex-segregated toilets, running water, soap, safe disposal systems and emergency menstrual supplies. 

Menstrual health education should begin before menarche, not after fear has already done its damage. Teachers should be trained. 

Primary healthcare systems should respond to menstrual pain and related concerns with seriousness, not dismissal. And boys must be taught too, because a society cannot end menstrual shame while raising half its population to laugh at it.

 Access, moreover, must not mean access to just anything. Safety and standards matter. 

In West and Central Africa, only Nigeria and Ghana currently have standards for menstrual products, and in Nigeria those standards cover only disposable pads. Even then, awareness and enforcement remain weak. If we are serious about dignity, then quality, affordability and trust must travel together. 

A poor girl should not have to choose between going without and making do with products she cannot fully trust.

They have spoken of silence in the home, fear in the classroom and shame carried for years. 

They have also spoken of what becomes possible when girls are given language, support and dignity. 

This is why the struggle for menstrual health is not about pads alone. It is about power. 

It is about whether a girl experiences her body as a source of humiliation or as part of her full humanity.

A nation reveals itself in the burdens it places on its girls.

Samira Buhari, the Founder of the Daurama Foundation, wrote from Abuja