Our journey began in 2017, while Alice Magaka was in her last year of high school at Loyola High School in Tanzania, she noticed that some girls in her school could not afford to buy packs of sanitary pads during their periods, which would then lead to a high number of school absenteeism. Alice got together with a group of friends and started the Pink Box Project, which was able to collect 150 packets of sanitary pads that assisted over 80 girls each month. Once Alice graduated from high school, she saw the need to take it to her community so she teamed up with another passionate young woman Rebecca Msangi who was working on advocating for making menstrual hygiene products accessible to children in public primary schools.
Within a few months, Alice was also admitted to a university in Rwanda where she met the rest of her teammates and officially started working as a team of 5 young women in May 2018. Each team member has an area of expertise and we all have a shared vision of working to improve the lives of other girls and young women in our society. So, we decided to change the organization’s goal to be more holistic and that same year, we changed the name to The Pink Box Initiative.