BAJURA: Forty community schools in Bajura are being enabled with female hygiene friendly environment including the construction of 22 such toilets.

The projects will include construction of female friendly toilets, management and distribution of sanitary pads, facility of drinking water, informed District Education Coordination Unit of Bajura. The toilets are being built in community schools located in Badimalika Municipality, Budhiganga Municipality, Triveni Municipality, Khaptad Chededaha and Gaumul Rural Municipalities with the help of Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) and Good Neighbours International (GNI), informed programme coordinator Devendra Shah. As many as 6,383 girl students will directly benefit from the project, Shah added. KOICA and GNI came forth to help with the construction in a bid to relieve girls in schools of the district from facing difficulties due to lack of female friendly facilities. The Korean Agency has been carrying out Health and Rights Improvement Project for Adolescent Girls through Menstrual Hygiene Management in Bajura. There are as many as 274 community and private schools in the district among which 63 are secondary schools while 21 are higher secondary schools. However, all of them lack proper facilities to ease the girl students during menstruation. Although the government issued the Sanitary Pad (Distribution and Management) Procedure-2019 to provide sanitary pads for adolescent girls studying in community schools free of cost, owing to lack of proper facilities, clean water and female friendly toilets, it has remained on papers only, informed a local leader, Pradip Raj Jaisi. The schools are only able to provide free sanitary pads that the girls have to use at their homes due to absence of appropriate facilities in schools. Girls in the schools have said that due to the absence of proper facilities, they are forced to miss their classes for at least three days every month. It is to be noted that the practice of 'Chhaupadi' is also prevalent in the far western districts.