Moshe, TZ – Knowledge and Skills sharing for healthy and educational community building at Soko – Apr 2026

It is just two years now since Soko Community were visited by our Better Lives board members from UK, Clive and Gill, who brought with them fantastic knowledge and skills about how to make reusable sanitary pads. They happily shared with our community through Alpha women VICOBA group who managed to perfectly acquire the knowledge and become experts on the making these pads, which are assisting our girls and mamas.

Once the program began, the Alpha women managed to make good reusable pads and marketed them locally. The results were inspiring: we observed continuous improvements in health, daily school attendance by making our girls more comfortable to focus on their studies in all school days, and academic performance. Families have also witnessed savings after stop buying the expensive pads, which is critical economic support regarding to their poverty level.
To strengthen this progress, better packaging and branding of the pads was necessary by Alpha group. This step expanded their market and impacted their income making very positively.

However, expanding the pad selling business has created a new challenge: the need for cleaning soaps for washing them. Alpha women were forced to make the washing soaps easily and cheaply available within the area so as to support the sustainability of the program and apparently this new soap business has gone further and improved the hygienic status of most families and directly for our school children who are now efficiently able to improve their cleanness after always being in a too much dust and mud environment. This not only put their hygienic standard higher but also improved their school attendance attitude by enabling them to be clean all the time.

Recognizing the benefits created with this Alpha women group in the community, Tupendane supported them with a mobile kiosk for boosting sales of their products in different areas and maintaining the group higher spirits on making more impact on their families and the community in whole.

Our next dream is to give more financial support through stress free loans to improve their business capital, which will assist earning sustainable income of the group. This makes a direct contribution to the life changes in the families.