If you opened one of South Africa’s biggest newspapers in recent days, you would have been met with a menstrual blood-like stain seeping through the front page, as if the newspaper had been used as a pad.
Created by advertising agency Joe Public in partnership with the MENstruation Foundation and Independent Media, the attention-grabbing campaign launched across The Star, The Mercury and the Cape Times newspapers this week.
It had a simple message: “A newspaper can absorb the blood, but not the shame.”
The campaign is designed to bring attention to the reality of period poverty in South Africa, where up to four million schoolgirls are forced to resort to unhygienic substitutes, like newspapers, rags or toilet paper, because they cannot afford period products.
According to the MENstruation Foundation, period poverty affects one in three schoolgirls who miss up to 60 school days each year due to a lack of access to period products.
Images of the newspapers have gone viral in South Africa and beyond, and the campaign has been widely praised online.
On Reddit and Instagram, people have described the campaign as “clever” and “powerful”, with some sharing their own experiences of period stigma and the struggle to access menstrual products.
The MENstruation Foundation is the largest non-profit distributor of free sanitary pads in Africa. The organisation provides free pads to around 100,000 girls every month.
In a post to Instagram, co-founder Siv Ngesi said the campaign was about making period poverty, an issue facing too many women and girls, front-page news.
“I believe if men bled once a month, sanitary pads would be free,” he said.
The campaign is the latest to bring the conversation around menstruation and the reality of period poverty out from behind closed doors.
It wasn’t until 2017 that a UK period product company showed a pad absorbing red, not blue, “period blood” in an advertisement. At the time, the ad showed a woman in the shower with blood running down her leg.
In Australia, period poverty remains a persistent issue affecting up to two thirds of Australians who menstruate, according to Share the Dignity’s latest research.