Project Free Period helps women in the sex trade, learn a new trade by using their period days. Since those are the only days when they cannot be forced to work.

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Unlike most women, commercial sex workers actually look forward to their periods. Because it’s the only time they cannot be forced to work.

Introducing Project Free Period.

An initiative that turned their 3 days of periods, or 3 days of no work, into 3 days of learning.

We partnered with professional trainers and Prerana, an anti-trafficking NGO, to create a unique curriculum.

It comprises of skills that can create economic sustenance, and are compressed into 3-day modules. So that they can use their period days to skill themselves in another trade.

After 6 months of intensive planning, in January 2018, we held our first workshop for women in Kamathipura, Asia’s 2nd largest red-light area.

Our curriculum was made up of 8 skills – candle making, henna design, envelope making, soft-toy making, embroidery, sandwich making and a basic beautician course. We ran these around the month, every month.

To help scale up our ability to train, on International Women’s Day, we put out a social media campaign to recruit volunteer trainers. We also got popular influencers like Olympic medalist, P.V. Sindhu and Instagram celebrity Priya Malik to talk about the initiative.

To build more awareness about Project Free Period, and also introduce our students to a new source of income, we held an exhibition of products made by our students at a prominent mall in Mumbai.

We shall soon be collaborating with other brands to create more training and recruitment options.

Unlike previous initiatives for these women, Project Free Period has seen no dropouts, with every student finishing at least one skill module.

We've conducted 120 days of training, with 8 economically viable vocational skills broken up into 40, three-day modules.

3060 days of periods have been converted into 3060 days of learning for these women.

The potential income generated, through products made and services taught during the workshops, amount to a whopping USD 30,500 (over 2 million Indian rupees).

We've built a trainer database of 742 volunteer trainers with varied skills.

The initiative has been covered by leading publications and supported by many celebrities and influencers.

Total reach - 20 million.

The category of sanitary protection has only shown periods as an obstacle to be overcome.

While combining two topics hitherto shrouded in silence, menstruation & prostitution, Project Free Period shifts the narrative from taboo to empowerment.

And allows people to participate in not just the conversation, but in the initiative as well.

As a brand, Stayfree stands for normalising periods in the lives of women. Here, we saw an opportunity to use periods to normalise the lives of commercial sex workers.

Through studies of market economics, we narrowed down skills that could generate sustainable incomes for these women in the future. We worked with professional trainers and NGO Prerana to compress these skills into 3-day modules that were easy to learn. The curriculum also allowed them to advance their skill with every module.

To be able to scale up the positive response from our early workshops, we later opened this initiative out to the world and invited volunteers to help us train. This earned a lot of media for the initiative and a lot of love for the brand. This also helped us refresh our curriculum with new skills, thereby attracting new students.

There’s nothing good that comes to mind when you think of periods. Even more so, in India. Here, girls drop out of school at the onset of periods. Women on their period are considered impure and disallowed entry into temples or even their own kitchens. It’s all of this that continues to drag the topic of periods deeper into the dark corners of society.

Stayfree, a leading sanitary brand, is committed to changing the perceptions and behaviour around periods. And we believe the only way to make society more comfortable about this topic is to keep sparking different conversations around this taboo subject.

And that’s what drew our attention to these women in the sex trade. While periods, for them, came with the same set of biological inconveniences, they actually looked forward to it. Because it was the only time of the month where they couldn’t be forced to work.