Developing a path out of poverty
Tess Tuitoek ’21 brought her menstrual health and hygiene project to her ancestral village in Kenya.
Tess Tuitoek ’21 was inspired to come to ɬ because of she read in Forbes magazine about Ellen Chilemba ’17, who founded Tiwale, an organization focused on lifting women and girls out of poverty in Chilemba’s native Malawi.
“I read an article about her in Forbes and I was just amazed,” said Tuitoek. “I said, ‘I have to come to ɬ. That’s how I'm going to end up.’”
Tuitoek, who designed her own major in global development and entrepreneurship with a Nexus: Curriculum to Career concentration in global business, wanted to develop a project to help her own ancestral community in Baringo county, Kenya. Now, on the verge of graduation, she has already developed an organization that distributes sexual health information in the form of comics and menstrual products in areas where neither is easy to come by.
The need is critical. Without sexual health and reproductive education and menstrual products, Tuitoek says, adolescents may be forced to stay home or abandon school altogether when they menstruate or become pregnant.
It all started in her sophomore year, when Tuitoek took a class in entrepreneurship with