Image Courtesy of Nikita Paudel.
When Nikita Paudel (YC ’25) got her first menstrual period at age eleven, she was escorted to another room to have dinner away from her family. “You get to watch TV and eat dinner in this room,” she recalled her mother saying. To Paudel, that experience was a first-hand account of the restrictions many families in Nepal place on women who are actively menstruating. “[My dad] told my mom, ‘If you treat Nikita like this, you might as well throw her out of the house,’” Paudel said. “I experienced firsthand how much of a voice men have in shaping menstruation experiences.” The stigma that these traditions place on the menstruation process is often further exacerbated by a lack of access to sanitary products.
Paudel established an education company called Pyari in January 2023 with co-founder Priyanshu Pokhrel, a junior at Wesleyan University, to address this inequity in menstruation from the cultural and structural aspects of menstrual health management. Pyari, meaning “cutie” or “lovable” in Nepali, is a direct rejection of the traditional view of menstruation as impure. The initiative branched out from an Environmental Studies course Paudel took on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Implementation.
While Paudel initially planned to establish Pyari as an initiative to teach young women to sew reusable pads, the varying access to basic hygienic products like soap or irons that women had in Nepal led her to shift Pyari’s focus to education. She later engaged the local ward and school committee chairperson in a presentation to increase awareness of the need for menstrual health and sanitation.
“What we’re hearing from the government and schools is they don’t have the time, resources, or manpower to improve the [sanitation infrastructure],” Paudel said. “So that’s where we want to fill that gap by really understanding the community’s needs and identifying the mismatch.”
One of the earliest roadblocks Paudel ran into was the diversity of cultural practices restricting equitable access to menstrual health. While the Pyari team had conducted extensive research into the hygiene infrastructure of various cities in Nepal—Syangja, Bajura, and Kathmandu—they found their work “went out the window” once they talked to residents in these communities. Last summer, the team conducted a needs assessment in Syangja with over fifty stakeholders to evaluate hygiene and menstrual health management issues and skill management.
“I think there’s a common misconception of the cultural stigmas surrounding menstrual health in Nepal,” Paudel said. “These taboos are actually very different geographically: there are some parts of Nepal where residents have never heard of the practice of restricting menstruation, but there are also other areas like Bajura, where women have to participate in Chhaupadi, a [practice] banning them from the house. We were able to really understand the full breadth of how intricate this was across Nepal and then figure out ways to be targeted no matter what community we went to.”
As a result, Paudel has developed guidelines to target the different restrictions of menstrual health equity and, in some cases, translate their educational materials between dialects like Nepali and Bajurali.
Paudel began placing more emphasis on education in an effort to spark a cultural shift, targeting children around the time they experience their first period so that the conversation could start earlier rather than later. “We began focusing more on education to try and cause a cultural shift by starting with children around the time they receive their first period, so we can get the conversation going early instead of later,” she said. These educational initiatives include in-person lectures to facilitate interactiveness between students and Pyari’s volunteers and create awareness for students in Nepal to engage with the direct action of touching a menstrual pad and tampon. Meanwhile, Pyari aims to station volunteers around Nepal to check the quality of water and create pictographs for kids to understand the steps of hand-washing and disposing of pads.
In a documentary filmed by Thibeaux Hirsh, a member of Pyari who is currently a senior at Wesleyan, there is a scene of a little boy in the Syangja community running up to Paudel and asking to express his opinions about the importance of respect for the film. “Building empathy early on is the ultimate goal of all of this,” Paudel said, speaking of the prevalence of domestic violence and sexual abuse in South Asia. “That’s why we start that conversation early: to get boys and girls to understand each other earlier on. If we’re able to do that, that will be the thing I’m proudest of,” she said.
Please see here for a documentary about Pyari, filmed by Thibeaux Hirsh.