Freedom Cups: Period Poverty Chronicles

Challenge

1 in 4 menstruators worldwide has no access to period products, clean water and adequate wash facilities. They live unseen, struggling with period poverty in underprivileged communities.

Period poverty is a global problem, it affects every underprivileged menstruator. Awareness is low due to social stigmas. Freedom Cups wanted to spark discussions and drive sustainable action by getting people to empathise with those trapped in period poverty.

Inspiration

Menstruators who can’t afford pads use newspapers as a desperate alternative. Drawing on this insight, we created a series of long-form copy press ads. Each tells the story of a young girl growing up in period poverty, forced to use a page like the one in the reader’s hands to manage her bleed. Each read is sobering yet absorbing, designed simply to create the shape of a pad that wasn’t there.

Idea

In the “Period Poverty Chronicles” their stories are brought to the world’s attention, through a series of long copy ads by Freedom Cups, detailing the unsettling coming of age experiences of three young girls in Manila, Chennai and Kuala Lumpur. Through their eyes, we see the deeper implications of cultural stigmas and social complexities that threaten to lock them into perpetual cycles of poverty.