After 7 decades of India’s independence, only 3% of women in rural and 20% of urban use pads.

As a result, 23 million girls fall out of the education system every year, leading to loss of $110 Billion to India’s GDP.

Menstruation is a profound, deeply entrenched taboo in India .

71% of Indian girls know nothing about periods until they start . They see menstruating as a sign of death, disease, shame.

Which causes deep-seated problems across society and seriously constrains a sanpro business.

Using old curtains, rags, cloth makes it hard to carry-on as normal.

The lifelong health and economic impacts are horrendous.

So, in 1993 Whisper started investing in school education.

But the taboo has an extremely strong hold.

Talking to girls about functional superiority of pads wasn’t relevant and won’t build the category given they don’t even understand what periods are.

The solution wasn’t advertising. It was education.

But we couldn’t educate every schoolgirl, especially when a whole new generation appears every year. It’s a vast undertaking.

By 2018 it was clear the only way to effect real change was to attack thousands of years of prejudice head-on.

We developed a new plan:

i. Hit the taboo where it’s most entrenched: rural India.

ii. Mobilise a pressure movement to get policy makers on-board.

We focussed on providing a practical solution, something concrete that would represent, and help to instigate real progress.

Our breakthrough moment was as shocking as it was simple.

We discovered that the tentacles of the taboo reached right into the heart of Government: in the 1950’s the Indian National Council Of Education had cut the chapter on menstruation from science textbooks, and schools in rural India still considered this missing chapter to be too disgraceful to include in a child’s education.

It was a tragic irony – the lack of proper menstrual education was damaging girls’ right to a proper education.

So, we weaponized the Missing Chapter, asking for it to be brought back to Indian schoolbooks.

Our idea was to design, disseminate and lobby for the Missing Chapter.

We executed it as an impossible-to-ignore, confrontationally graphic icon:

 Unapologetically blood-red

 Unequivocally female gynaecological imagery

 Explicitly and clearly explaining the menstruation process

We recruited Metro elites through social-media and a film showing girls having the courage to take a stand, reading the chapter in school, and being empowered as a result. These activities were backed-up with a pledge that every pack of Whisper would fund a girl’s period education and pads.

But our biggest challenge was reaching rural Indians. Not only do marcoms channels simply not exist in most of these areas, but languages and cultures change every 20 kms. So, in a world-first, we collaborated with local artists from 25 states, using traditional wall-art to render the chapter in the local art form.