Founder's Story
Dr. NOLWAZI NADIA NCUBE
"A period,
Should end a sentence.
Not a girl's education."
In 2015, not long after I had graduated with my Master’s from the University of Cape Town (UCT), my great Aunt, Gogo Joice Dube reached out to me to tell me that girls in our village were missing school due to a lack of access to sanitary wear. She had mobilised a donation of sanitary wear to distribute in the village. The donation included both (re)washable sanitary wear - including underwear, and disposable pads. As a sociologist, I was keen to make this movement sustainable but also be able to adapt continually to the needs of the beneficiaries, our “Saved Girls”.
-Melissa Barton
Dr. Ncube at Arts in Health Research Intensive 2020
I carried out baseline interviews and then set up and registered Save the Girl Child Movement as a Trust. We received support from the Geddes Foundation in Cyprus and would buy sanitary wear for our Saved Girls each year. I then decided in 2016 to do a PhD in sociology focusing on “narratives of menstruation” in order to advocate for sanitary dignity for our Saved Girls and all menstruating persons. I have since completed that PhD it is accessible on OpenUCT via this link.
My thesis critiques the way that we do development work and what some scholars refer to as “dominant deficit discourses”. We at SGCM want to move the dial and look to a new way of doing development work by employing cryptocurrency in our funding and distribution models.
Dr. Ncube - If I aint't got you cover
