When we talk about banana value chain, the conversations always revolves around how we can produce more and superior variety of bananas.
The focus is always on regular bananas for ripening as a fruit and some varieties such as plantain are ignored yet they are feeding Africans across the continent and globally are great source of fibre, and vitamins.
But today I want to focus on something else.
What do we usually do with banana stems?
In my village in muranga County, and what is a general practice is that, once we harvest the bananas we cut it and give it directly to the cows(not a good practice)
When it is the rainy season, and there is a lot of greenery, hence more options for cow fodder, we cut them and let rot in the farm, to replenish the soil.(a good practice but takes so long to decompose)
Now, what if I told you we can turn these banana stems into high value, highly sought product with great social impact?
What if we made sanitary towels from it?
Research says that an average medium to large sized stem can produce 3000 pads!
To put that into perspective,
Let’s assume average period 3 days
Let’s assume average pad usage of 4_6 pads per day
Let’s assume further that 15 pads per month on average.
So 3000 pads is 200 months supply.
That translates to 16.6 years 😳 of pads supply just from one stem?
Why are we not doing it?
Watch this video for better understanding of this opportunity
Credit: Wangechi Kuria
