There is growing global momentum around addressing menstruation as an important health, education, and gender equality issue. However, a critical barrier to making progress on addressing menstruation and the range of girls’ needs around this issue, is the lack of adequate validated measures to monitor MHH within global health and development sectors.  In collaboration with partners from around the world, we are working to push forward initiatives to identify, validate or develop relevant indicators and measurement tools. 

• Phase 1 (2019): Monitoring MHH: Measuring Progress for Girls Related to Menstruation
• Phase 2 (2020-2021): Making Progress on Monitoring MHH

RESOURCES:

These five one-pagers provide snapshots of the key insights and priorities per priority area:

• Overview: Education & MHH
• Overview: Gender & MHH
• Overview: Psychosocial Health & MHH
• Overview:  Sexual and Reproductive Health & MHH
• Overview: Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) & MHH

PUBLICATIONS:

• Sommer, M., Zulaika, G., Schmitt, M., Gruer, C. (Eds.) Monitoring Menstrual Health and Hygiene: Measuring Progress for Girls on Menstruation; Meeting Report. New York & Geneva: Columbia University and WSSCC. 2019.  
• Marni Sommer, Belen Torondel, Julie Hennegan, Penelope A. Phillips-Howard, Thérèse Mahon, Albert Motivans, Garazi Zulaika, Caitlin Gruer, Jacquelyn Haver, Bethany A. Caruso & Monitoring Menstrual Health and Hygiene Group (2021) How addressing menstrual health and hygiene may enable progress across the Sustainable Development Goals, Global Health Action, 14:1.

MAKING PROGRESS ON MONITORING MENSTRUAL HEALTH & HYGIENE

In 2020, with generous funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Columbia University and our core collaborating partners from WaterAid, Save the Children, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Liverpool of Tropical Medicine, Emory University and the Burnet Institute initiated a new project to push forward this agenda. The focus of this follow-on project is to address a key recommendation of national governments to develop a short list of indicators for each of the five areas that can be taken up and utilized for monitoring progress. The project will bring together leading measurement and monitoring global experts, including representatives from four national governments, including four exemplar countries, to identify a selection of MHH indicators and related measures from the priority areas (education, gender, WASH and health [SRH; psychosocial health]).  
The proposed aims of the project are: 

1. to consolidate a set of initial recommended indicators for monitoring progress by national governments (and at global level) such that quality and comparable data is collected; 

2. to identify items to measure/assess priority indicators; and 

3. to identify specific areas that need further measure development and validation. 

As a reminder, the Priority List of Indicators for Girls’ Menstrual Health and Hygiene is now available along with Spanish, French and Arabic translations and other resources here.  Please let us know if you have any questions or comments!