According to a Havoscope, India has the second largest number of sex workers in the world. There are an estimated 20 million female sex workers in India, with Mumbai alone accounting for almost 200,000 of them. Tricked or trafficked into sex work, they are ill-treated abused and exploited on a daily basis. 400,000 female sex workers in India were estimated to be living with HIV, in 2016.

Research shows that a mere 7% of women ever get rescued. But many still return to the trade, because they are unable to find other ways to sustain themselves. This is mainly because a lot of them are forced into the trade at a young age, so they never get a chance to learn any skill. To make matters worse, once they’re older and unable to attract customers, the lack of livelihood often forces them to push their children into the same trade. And just like that, many generations get stuck in a vicious cycle.

The only way to rescue these women from the trade is to give them the opportunity to learn another trade. But their pimps and brothel owners make sure they do not have the time for anything else.

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.

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 and even their own kitchens. And the list goes on and on.

Stayfree, a leading feminine hygiene brand, is committed to changing the perceptions and behaviour around periods. We believe that periods shouldn’t come in the way of anyone moving towards their dreams of progress. And we also believe that the only way to make society more comfortable about this taboo subject is to keep sparking different conversations around it.

And that’s what drew our attention to these women in the sex trade.

Marginalised and relegated to the absolute fringes of society, this community seldom figures in any mainstream conversation or initiative. The brutalities of their everyday and the blatant ostracisation by society first strips them of their dignity and then of every dream.

But their period days is one thing they always look forward to. Because it is the only time of the month when they cannot be forced to work.