Thank you, Madam Chair.
Hello. I'm Leisa Hirtz, founder and CEO of Women's Global Health Innovations, a Canadian social enterprise researching, developing, manufacturing and currently distributing our innovative Bfree Cup globally.
As a Canadian social entrepreneur and innovator, I am developing disruptive period products intended to address the complex challenges menstruators face in managing their periods, while taking into consideration social, environmental and economic sustainability. Our mission at Women’s Global Health Innovations is to improve the menstrual health outcomes—and thus lives—of the world’s most marginalized adolescent girls and young women.
As a member of the UN Global Compact, we play a vital role as one of the many private sector participants actively working towards the achievement of the sustainable development goals. According to UNICEF, 1.8 billion people across the world menstruate monthly, and according to the World Bank, 500 million lack access to menstrual products and adequate sanitation facilities to manage their periods safely and with dignity.
The idea of the Bfree Cup was born after I learned first-hand how adolescent girls and young women living in Kenya’s and Uganda’s urban slums and refugee settlements faced some of the harshest conditions and challenges to managing their periods.
Lack of access to clean water, affordable menstrual products and private female-friendly sanitation facilities led to high-risk behaviours including transactional sex to buy pads or the unhealthy reliance on makeshift products like old socks, mattress stuffing, goat skin, dried cow dung and reportedly the washing and reusing of products intended for single use. Additionally, girls reported rolling up pads and inserting them vaginally as many do not have underwear to hold their menstrual pads in place.
Conversely, the reusability—thus improved accessibility—of menstrual cups promised a healthier solution, but unfortunately the need for them to be boiled was seen as a deterrent to adoption.
I soon learned that this was a reality not only in Kenya and Uganda. Similar stories exist right here in Canada.
The Bfree Cup is proudly a Canadian innovation developed in partnership with researchers at the faculty of engineering at the University of Toronto. The Bfree Cup is the first and only physically antibacterial menstrual cup available on the market today. Its surface prevents a biofilm—thus bacteria—from forming, meaning that unlike all other menstrual cups, the Bfree Cup does not need boiling after each menstrual period.
Cleaning the Bfree Cup is easy. It can be lightly rinsed or simply wiped clean. The Bfree cup was described by a senior menstrual product developer with Johnson & Johnson as the first real innovation in menstrual products since Kotex put adhesive on the back of a menstrual pad.
With respect to environmental sustainability, one Bfree Cup can be used for upwards of 10 years, replacing 3,000 to 5,000 plastic-based disposable products, many of which take upwards of 500 to 800 years to decompose in a landfill. To date, the Bfree Cup has diverted 1.2 million disposable products from landfill, saved over 185,000 litres of water and reached over 18,000 marginalized adolescent girls and young women in Africa and South America, as well as indigenous women in the United States.
We have implemented projects in Kenya and Uganda and supported many other projects and programs in sub-Saharan Africa and South America, relying on a user-centred design approach.
A pilot project implemented in two secondary schools in northern Uganda, supported by a grant from the United Nations Population Fund, helped us reach 350 schoolgirls with education and the Bfree Cup. At end line, a 91% successful product uptake amongst the participants was documented. We remain committed to continuing research and development while expanding our manufacturing capacity here in Canada. Currently, research is under way in partnership with McMaster University for the development of two novel menstrual products that will broaden user choice of environmentally sustainable products.
I would also like to add that Bfree is a proud member of the Sustainable Menstrual Equity Coalition of Canada, from whom this committee has already heard.
We are collectively and collaboratively combining our decades of Canadian and international experience to address period poverty and to advocate for policy changes in Canada to raise awareness of the challenges that so many Canadians face managing their periods with dignity, and to establish initiatives to provide high-quality, safe, dioxin-free, sustainable choice in menstrual products for those in need, domestically and internationally.
Let us work together to deploy a team Canada approach to ensure that menstrual equity is achieved here in Canada and on a global level, through leveraging the knowledge and experience of our Canadian women entrepreneurs and innovators to establish a comprehensive social, environmental and economically sustainable national standard.
Thank you for the invitation and opportunity to speak with you today.