This is brilliantly written with simple language and how most EAs I think should default to writing about AI. The last line with the toddler reference just capoed it off.

One of the few articles about AI that o can share with my friends.

100% Agree good point. For the sake of a readable article I simplified and looked at the pad cost benefit rather than focusing on the larger healthcare benefit if it was rags.

100% true. Went for the cardinal sin of ease of understanding over accuracy ;).

Thanks Ian those are great points!

It might seem strange but there are many choices that poor people make that could save tens of dollars a year, that people don't take advantage of. I would weakly disagree that poor people are good at saving money, especially if it requires a small investment first. The book Poor Economics has a really good section on this. Here are some classic examples where poor people don't spend a few dollars to save in the future.

1. Prioritising handwashing devices at home. These prevent illness and hospital bills. Here in Uganda people will almost always buy a couch and a TV before they will even buy a 10 dollar handwashing bucket, it's kind of insane. Along the same lines consider the failure of the Evidence action Chlorine dispenser project (read the great post about this by the way). People could spend a few dollars to improve their family's hygeine but don't.

2. People could buy in even moderate bulk rather than buying tiny amounts every day. If people spent $5 vs. the usual 50c buying foodstuffs there are many cases where they could save money by spending just a bit more.

3. Selling crops out of season. People could often wait just two months and sell crops for over 20% more than in peak season. But almost everyone wants all the money right now. Then after selling people put the money in a village saving group which makes zero interest, rather than selling two months later for afar more money. Its quite incredible.

I'll also note that women are often especially economically disempowered and have even less scope to spend a bit of money to make their lives better.

In terms of the market in general, there is indeed huge market failure when it comes to period products. "Big Period" as it were has zero incentive to advocate for a product which you buy once for $5 and then never again. They sell tampons and pads every month at huge profits, and will do everything that they can to avoid products that will make them less money.

Indeed Living Goods would actually be the perfect  kind of organisation to be a distribution network. But for cups to go big it would require a concerted effort across multiple actors, probably needing some kind of serious lobby group and co-ordination. I'm not suggesting that yet as I'm not sure there's good enough effort to warrant that.

Yes there are a lot of people selling reusable pads in Uganda and other countries. I'm partially challenging whether there should be more of a focus on cups than pads.

 

Yes that's correct it is still evidence for sure, just what might be considered "lower level" evidence. 

Thanks @Julia_Wise🔸 and @MHR🔸 for the fantastic responses. I talked to a couple of people involved in cup distribution in low income countries, and their take was that if water is good enough to wash clothes and bodies, it should be good enough to wash cups. I'm not sure if this is evidence based though.

So in some very remote places with highly dirty/infected water it could be a problem, but those situations would be rare. Like others say there's sparse to no evidence that washing cups with unclean water has caused problems with cups.

Thanks Ligea that's great to hear and and impressive price for sure!

Yes that s great point. I probably should have included a section about reusable pads as that has been the predominant solution tried out so far by NGOs in recent times. Both through local community manufacturing and larger scale commercial operations like Afripads.

Adoption is likely easier than cups but I suspect reusable pads might be inferior on price, comfort and perhaps hygiene depending on washing techniques