Every sunrise, Kenya loses two billion shillings – gone before most citizens have their morning tea. Two billion. The number sounds abstract until you count what it could mean for real lives.
Two billion shillings could provide sanitary pads for more than 200,000 girls, every single day. It could keep thousands of girls in school, restore their dignity, and protect them from infections caused by unsafe menstrual alternatives. It could mean hope instead of humiliation.
But instead, it vanishes – swallowed by corruption, inflated tenders, and government wastage dressed as “development.” We watch billions flow out of our pockets through taxes, yet we cannot afford to secure the dignity of our daughters.
A pack of sanitary pads costs about KSh150. The average girl needs roughly 300 pads a year; about KSh4,500 annually. Now imagine what one billion shillings could do: it could sustain menstrual health for more than 220,000 girls for an entire year. Two billion could double that; it could empower nearly half a million young women with confidence, education, and self-worth.
Yet, these same girls still miss school every month. Some use rags, newspapers, or leaves because their government can’t keep track of where their taxes go. This isn’t just a failure of budgeting. it’s a betrayal of priorities.
Our leaders talk of billions like pocket change — “two billion lost per day” — and still smile for cameras. They build stadiums before schools, host concerts before clinics, and fund political retreats before menstrual programs. All while mothers, sisters, and daughters pay the hidden price of inequality.
When a girl drops out of school because she cannot manage her period, it’s not just her future that’s lost; it’s the nation’s potential, drained quietly, like the billions we never see again.
We talk of corruption as numbers, but its victims have faces; girls forced into early marriages, women suffering infections in silence, young dreams dimmed by shame.
This is not just about money. It’s about dignity, empathy, and justice. If two billion can disappear in a day, then it can also reappear – in classrooms, in health centers, in the hands of the girls who deserve better.
The river of corruption has swept away enough.
It’s time Kenya learned to respect its daughters…before they, too, are washed away by the same neglect that drains our future.
