Elizabeth Scharpf, founder and Chief Instigating Officer of Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE), spoke last Monday to Allan Chochinov’s class in the MFA Design program. The goal was to inspire students as they embark on a final project about women and girls in his 3D design class.

Equipped with both a Harvard MBA and MPA in International Development, Elizabeth left school with enough credentials to take on the world. Serendipitously, her work at the World Bank in Mozambique, Africa led her to coach a girl’s soccer team, where she first came across the lack of access to sanitary pads when one of the girls had to miss practice because she was menstruating. SHE was formulated and kicked off by helping local women in Rwanda jump-start their own businesses to manufacture and distribute affordable, quality, and eco-friendly sanitary pads.

The high cost of the sanitary pads were attributed to three main factors: tax, distribution and raw material costs. After a period of research and experimentation, Elizabeth and her team came through with a lower cost, locally produced material developed from the bark of the banana tree, and have trained a network of women on hygiene and care to start manufacturing and distributing the pads on the ground. SHE reduced the cost of a sanitary pad from $1.10 to $0.70 with additional room for reduction if they successfully work with local legislators to remove or reduce the tax going forward.

Elizabeth’s passion and energy for this cause reverberated in SHE’s landmark successes thus far. To find out more, please visit SHE at: “http://sheinnovates.com/”:http://sheinnovates.com/ and take a look at the campaign “here:”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn8DbEZhr5Q

(Post by “Lillian Lee”:https://design.sva.edu/site/students/show/243, MFAD’11)