In Türkiye, menstrual justice remains easier to fund as relief than to recognise as a matter of public responsibility. This gap helps to explain why urgent needs are addressed, while structural change remains harder to build.

In Türkiye, menstrual poverty is easiest to recognise when it appears as an immediate need: a lack of products, a missed school day, or a crisis affecting those already pushed to the margins.

It is much less recognised as a question of public responsibility. This gap reflects a wider climate where gender equality remains politically contested. It has become harder to sustain the language of women’s rights in public debate, especially after Türkiye’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, the Council of Europe treaty on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence.

In this setting, menstrual justice still struggles to be recognised in policy and funding debates as a structural issue in its own right. More often, it is treated in fragments: as relief, as hygiene, as part of girls’ education, or as crisis response.

When Funding Menstrual Justice, Product Access Is Not Enough

Support for girls’ education is not the same as support for gender justice more broadly. Education can widen opportunity, but it does not by itself undo unequal power.

Menstrual justice is about much more than whether someone can access pads. It is also about whether menstruation can be named without shame, whether people have access to reliable information, whether menstrual pain is taken seriously, and whether the burden of managing menstruation is recognised as something wider than a private issue.

Bahar Aldanmaz, a Turkish feminist researcher writing on period poverty in Türkiye, makes a similar point in her 2024 paper: product support matters, but it does not by itself address wider inequalities. The issue also has to be understood through reproductive justice, feminist health, and human rights. This reflects what many of us working in this field see in practice. In Türkiye, the problem is not the absence of local work. Civil society organisations, educators, and grassroots groups have already made menstrual poverty much more visible. The difficulty is that this visibility has still not gained stable recognition in policy or philanthropy.

Read the full article about funding menstrual justice in Türkiye by Fer Özgüler at Alliance Magazine.