WomenChoice Industries

Posted By Graymatterscap On Mon, Mar 16, 2020

WomenChoice Industries is a social enterprise established in January 2017, that manufactures and distributes low cost, affordable menstrual hygiene management reusable sanitary towels to women and girls from low resource settings in Tanzania. It envisions a world where young women and girls aged 9-24 years in Africa have access to low cost, affordable menstrual hygiene management care products removing all hindrances that prevent them from going to school.

It is on a mission of ensuring that  every girl from low resource settings in Africa stop using unhygienic materials and instead choose its ‘Salama Pads’ which are low cost, affordable and high quality reusable sanitary towels.

Investment Rationale

Menstruation is making girl students in Tanzania and across Africa abstain from school for 48-84 days annually, impacting their school attendance and academic performances. Reusable sanitary towels like WomenChoice Industries’ Salama Pad’ have shown to reduce incidences of MHM related school dropouts and menstrual health problems resulting from the use of unhygienic materials. In addition, it is also creating a market opportunity for women and girls from vulnerable low-income families by recruiting them as part of its distribution model and imparting them with essential skills such as business and financial management, book and record keeping, and sales.

The funding of US$ 200,000 is aimed at helping WomenChoice Industries reach out to 500,000 women and girls from low-resource settings, to use its reusable sanitary towels by December 2022.

About Graymatterscap

Gray Matters Capital (GMC) is an Atlanta based impact investor with a gender lens that is on a mission to “Find a more purposeful life for 100 million women by 2036." Aligning with its mission is its strategy of making sector agnostic investments globally in for-profit enterprises whose products and services benefit women and girls at scale.

GMC sees education, primarily catering to under-resourced and low and middle income sections of the society, as a powerful tool to bring about gender equality and social equity. Over the past 12 years, it has focused on supporting the education ecosystem India by funding for-profit enterprises in the ‘learning to earning’ space, besides being pioneers in establishing the school finance industry catering to low cost private schools in India with Indian School Finance Company (ISFC); Pakistan with the set-up of Taleem Finance Company Ltd (TFCL), in addition to Nigeria (with EdFin Microfinance Bank).

GMC has till date funded over 80 enterprises across the world to the tune of US$ 125 million.

To know more, visit: graymatterscap.com