The Egyptian apps taking the shame out of periods
Only one Egyptian woman in five has medical insurance. A Cairo app and a maker of reusable underwear are building products around what women will not ask aloud.
Cairo — Egyptian start-ups are building women's health products around a simple observation, Radio France Internationale reports from Cairo: foreign apps reach only a narrow slice of Egyptian women, and the ones that work are designed for the language and the silences of the place.
An app that knows when to be quiet
Aziza, founded by Nesma Amin in 2023, is built around menstruation. It tracks periods and pregnancies and answers users' questions.
Its notifications are deliberately discreet, so that nothing awkward appears on a phone screen that someone else might see. It has no paid subscription. Ms Amin works with doctors on its features and trains her team to handle sensitive conversations, and the app has more than 75 student ambassadors, all of them medical students.
A medical anthropologist who studies sexual and reproductive health in Egypt, Sohayla El Fakahany, told RFI that language and cultural nuance are part of what makes such a product work at all, not extras added afterwards.
Why the need is large
A 2019 study by Baseera, an independent Egyptian polling centre, found that only 20% of Egyptian women are covered by medical insurance. Apart from emergency care and some essentials such as childhood vaccines, health services are paid for out of pocket, and private insurance is beyond the average household.
The economics of a pad
Disposable pads are almost the only menstrual product most Egyptian women use. Data on tampons is thin, and small neighbourhood pharmacies seldom stock them. RFI links that to stigma about virginity: unmarried women are warned against anything that is inserted.
Shemsi, a Cairo company, makes period underwear that can be washed with ordinary laundry and reused for up to 300 washes. Its chief executive, Hatem Elkady, says the market had barely changed in decades.
Price is the obstacle. A large pack of pads costs roughly $2 in Egypt, and a pair of Shemsi's underwear closer to $14. The company offers instalment plans to spread the cost.
This report is based on reporting by Radio France Internationale, via AllAfrica.
