The Feministing Five: Elizabeth Scharpf

Elizabeth Scharpf is the founder of Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE), a social venture that brings together women’s rights, public health and global economics in one amazing project. Scharpf, who has an MBA from Harvard Business School and an MPA in international development from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, has spent much of her professional life in start up healthcare ventures. Several years ago, while working in Mozambique, she saw the connection between inadequate sanitary protection for menstruating girls and women, and lost income and education for towns, cities and entire countries.
When menstruating girls and women have to use rags or bark, or are afraid of leaking, they miss school and work – up to fifty days a year. That translates into lost opportunities for girls, lost income for women, and decreased economic activity for whole communities. So Scharpf launched SHE, which gives out microfinance loans and basic health training to local women so that they can manufacture pads from local, sustainable materials, and sell them at an affordable price. Selling the pads is a source of income for the individual women, and when girls and women in their communities have access to pads, they’re less likely to contract infections and are able to participate in public life every day of the month. This is ripple effect, market-based international feminism.
Scharpf notes that there are enormous challenges, and the taboos around menstruation are among the greatest of them. The SHE 28 campaign is the first step in breaking down barriers to talking about menstruation on the ground, and to funding sanitary protection projects here in the US. Also, their promo video is totally awesome.
And now, without further ado, the Feministing Five, with Elizabeth Scharpf.

Chloe Angyal: How did you come to be interested in this aspect of international development, and to found Sustainable Health Enterprises?
Elizabeth Scharpf: I recognized, like a lot of other people, that investing in women is a fantastic of increasing the well-being of families, communities and countries. For every dollar a woman earns, about ninety cents is invested in her family. And obviously, when families do well, communities thrive and when communities thrive, nations thrive. So I really look at women as being this key point to increasing the quality of life for many people.
I’m trained as an economist. I was working in Mozambique and realized that by increasing girls’ and women’s access to sanitary pads creates this ripple effect in the economic ecosystem. Once they have access to the pad they can go to school and go to work. What I found out from talking to entrepreneurs in Mozambique was that women were not going to work up to fifty days per year, because they used rags, and rags weren’t effective. The multinational brand pads are typically too expensive – they’re a day’s worth of wages, if not more. So this is a really simple way to have a huge effect on individuals, families, communities and nations. It has an effect on education, on the economy and on health, too.
So I founded SHE, which is a social venture that uses business approaches to solve problems, whether they be in education, health or economic development. I founded it because in developing countries, there’s a gap between the big companies and NGOs, and generally, when large companies operate in developing countries, they’re only interested in the very rich consumer. They don’t address the needs of anyone except the top five percent of the population. And then you have the NGO approach, which is typically only a hand out or donation approach to addressing the not-rich. And that approach hasn’t been that effective over the last fifty years. So I was working with a very large NGO, and saw firsthand when I was working in Mozambique as well as in Brazil and China, and I saw a great need for a new type of approach to addressing social problems. An approach that used the best of both worlds – the business approaches of the big multinational corporations, but at the same time, having the goal of a social impact like in the NGO world. And so I created SHE as a response to that.
There are a lot of obstacles. Specific to the SHE 28 initiative, is the problem that menstruation is such a taboo, not only in developing countries, but also in the United States. One of the examples I give when I’m speaking before an audience is that when Hillary Clinton goes to the bathroom to change her tampon, she probably discreetly puts it in her pocket, and I ask the audience the same question: how likely is it that they’ll pull out their pad or their tampon and proudly march to the bathroom? So the taboo that stops us just from being able to talk about these issues is one huge obstacle.
We’re also trying to change the way international development operates. NGOs have typically taken a donation-only approach or a hand out approach, and so typically, the people that they’re working with in developing countries are use to that as well. So for example, when we first started the SHE 28 initiative, we trained fifty community healthcare workers in menstrual hygiene and in some simple business skills, and typically, people would be paid to go to training, and what we said was that because we were providing them with a valuable skill, they could come to the training for a nominal fee, or they could apply for a scholarship. And the majority of people had scholarships, but we turned the international development model on its head, and made it clear that this wasn’t going to be hand out only. And to be honest, the response from the Rwandans we were working with was actually very positive.

CA: Who is your favorite fictional heroine?
ES: It’s Little Red Riding Hood, of course.
CA: Who are your heroines in real life?
ES: My grandmother. She was the eldest of five kids, and the only woman. She left a small town in Ireland when she was 19, and brought up four daughters, all college-educated. I’m the last of her grandchildren, and she really epitomizes entrepreneurship and compassion for family and community.
Also, the first women to graduate from the University of Notre Dame, which was, I believe in 1976. Not even that long ago. I went there for undergrad, and it was hard to be a woman at Notre Dame in the late nineties; I can’t imagine what it was like in the late seventies.
They not only were women’s voices very small in number, but also, they were at a Catholic University, which has no women in positions of real authority either. The President of Notre Dame University always has to be a priest. And a priest in the Catholic Church always has to be a man.
CA: What recent news story made you want to scream?
ES: There was an article in Forbes about how Wall Street women were being disproportionately hurt by the downturn, and the punchline was always, “When so-and-so came back from maternity leave…” It just proved that Wall Street is not ready for kick ass mothers who are also executive vice presidents. Women are the majority of college graduates these days, and only make up 1% of Fortune 500 CEOs.
CA: What, in your opinion, is the biggest challenge facing feminism today?
ES: The same obstacle that we face in the SHE 28 initiative, which is trying to convey that women’s issues are everyone’s issues.
CA: You’re going to a desert island, and you’re allowed one food, one drink and one feminist. What do you take?
ES: Cherry pie, champagne and whoever invented the female condom.