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.
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.
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.
This is where philanthropy has a more important role to play. It is not only there to respond to urgent need, but also to help neglected issues gain wider recognition.
With menstrual justice, that means going beyond funding products, short-term support, or narrowly targeted local projects. It also means backing the slower work that is much harder to measure, but necessary for change: research, public communication, coalition-building, advocacy, and the long-term sustainability of organisations working in this field. Without that, even very good local initiatives can remain local. They may relieve harm, but they do not easily build the public language or policy momentum needed to shift institutions.
In practice, support for menstrual health often comes through frames that are easier to explain and easier to fund. Hygiene is one. Girls’ education is another. Work with vulnerable communities, especially in crisis settings, is another. All of these matter, and all of them respond to genuine need. But when the issue is mostly seen through these frames, the wider gender-justice dimension starts to slip out of view.
What gets supported is the result of inequality, while the conditions that create that inequality are left more or less untouched.
This trend is easiest to see in the hygiene frame. Hygiene support is tangible. It produces visible results and responds to immediate need, so it is often the easiest kind of support to justify. But it can also make the issue look smaller than it is.
Menstrual poverty is about stigma, silence, lack of information, untreated pain, and the everyday work of managing menstruation in places that do not take menstruation into account.
A similar issue comes up when menstrual poverty is framed mainly through girls’ education. This can be a valid and important entry point, especially where attendance is fragile and where early school leaving or early and forced marriage remain real concerns.
The aim is not only to soften the effects of neglect. It is also to make that neglect visible, documented, and politically clear enough that public institutions can no longer avoid responding to it.
There is also the question of scale. In recent years, a lot of necessary funding has gone to disaster-affected areas or to communities identified as especially vulnerable. In a country shaped by overlapping crises and deep inequalities, that makes sense. It is also needed. But there is a side effect.
When menstrual health is mostly funded in exceptional settings, the issue itself can start to look exceptional. Something that affects people across the country begins to appear as if it belongs only to crisis zones, marginalised groups, or emergency periods. And when that happens, local projects may do important work where they are, but they can not easily build their work into a shared public language or a national advocacy agenda.
This has real consequences for civil society. Local organisations gather evidence, build trust, and respond with care, but they often have very limited room to turn that work into wider policy pressure. Without sustained support for advocacy, coordination, and public engagement, it is hard to move from local proof to national recognition.
The problem is not a lack of effort. The problem is that local work is rarely given the support it needs by connecting outward to other organisations, to public debate, and to policy change. Without that, even very strong work can remain at the level of response rather than transformation.
This is where the roles of civil society and philanthropy come together most clearly. Civil society helps make visible what the state ignores, leaves unmet, or prefers not to see.
Philanthropy should help create resources in exactly those neglected spaces. But neither is there to replace public responsibility indefinitely. The aim is not only to soften the effects of neglect. It is also to make that neglect visible, documented, and politically clear enough that public institutions can no longer avoid responding to it.
That is the real challenge for philanthropy in Türkiye. The question is not whether it should support relief, girls’ education, or work with vulnerable groups. It should. The harder question is whether it is willing to support the slower, less visible work that allows these efforts to become more than isolated interventions.
