Youth work is the best educational approach that can address menstruation more broadly. Through youth work, we have seen a huge rise in effective media and community-based interventions creating visibility and raising-awareness on complex issues. It is thus feasible and achievable for youth work to integrate such approaches to advocate for menstrual health and hygiene awareness in the out of school environment.
Since the main difficulty is that there is no enough familiarity with menstruation among those involved in youth work in the context of no-formal education, we aim to facilitate youth workers' empowerment to become more familiar with menstrual health and hygiene, and ensure that they are able to transfer and apply acquired menstrual knowledge, skills, and attitudes in their youth work or practices by focusing on difficulties faced by the various menstruating persons while experiencing and managing their periods, when trying to get decent and affordable menstrual hygiene products, and how the lack of healthy, safe and dignified facilities for the management of menstruation makes it difficult for menstruators to cope with their daily routines, such as going to school or work.
Hence, this menstrual knowledge assessment provides learning opportunities to equip youth and youth workers with menstrual skills and attitudes to analyse and respond to socio-cultural and gender norms that affect youth perceptions on menstruation, to better understand how young cisgender girls, non-binary, intersex, trans-men and other identities experience menstruation. Thus, before taking a part in our training on menstrual health literacy, this assessment tool provides participants the opportunity to assess their knowledge concerning menstrual health and hygiene awareness which allows us to design a menstrual education and training programme that is built on and reflects the participants learning needs, knowledge gaps, and experiences to make sure that all the participants can learn and perform at a common rhythm during the training.
