In one way, though, Musaazi remains a prophet unrecognized in his own land. Makerere University has yet to adopt any of his technologies. Musaazi estimates that simply installing a rainwater system would save the university $100,000 a month. Even more frustrating: The engineering faculty—which trains the country's civil engineers and architects—teaches only traditional methods of construction, ignoring the new, sustainable model visible through its windows.
"If a civil engineer does not study this product in university, he cannot recommend it," says Musaazi. "He says the teacher did not teach it to me, so I am not so sure it is good. If someone is building a house and the architect does not specify my bricks, he won't use them."
A wide bandage spans the brow of Ibrahim Rumanyika. In a perverse way, it is a testament to Musaazi's success.
The Kyaka II refugee settlement in western Uganda houses roughly 16,000 people in mud huts connected by a road that is mostly rut. Ibrahim arrived here with a younger brother in 2003, fleeing the Second Congo War. Since 2007, he has supervised the settlement's MakaPad plant, which employs 45 refugees earning as much as $200 a month. It is by far the settlement's most substantial employer, "so people in the village perceive that we are rich," explains Rumanyika, who was attacked for his money, which pays for his brother's boarding school.
Rumanyika escorts me around the compound, explaining the process by which every month, 167 kilograms of papyrus chopped from a nearby swamp become 100,000 sanitary pads. Virtually all are bought by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, which distributes them here and at other Ugandan settlements. Workers peel the thick green stalks and pound them into fiber, then mix them with wet paper waste, donated by NGOs and businesses, to create a slurry that is dried on frames laid on wooden racks in the sun. Other workers remove the stiff, dried sheets; slide them through softening machines (designed by Musaazi); cut them to size; and seal them in polyethylene imported from China, using an electric sealing machine (modified by Musaazi). Finally, the pads are sterilized in plastic buckets under ultraviolet lights.
It is a surprising business in a country where discussion of menstruation is taboo. Sexual predators target children of reproductive age, and some girls fear their pads or rags will be stolen and used for witchcraft. Most African men know nothing of the subject and want to keep it that way. Musaazi, married nearly 40 years and with a grown daughter, claims he had never seen a sanitary pad until 2003 when "I was at a meeting at the Kampala Sheraton and a woman threw one in my face."
That woman was Katherine Namuddu, the now-retired associate director of the Africa Regional Office at the Rockefeller Foundation. Since the early 1990s, Namuddu has worked to improve African girls' access to education, critical to reducing poverty. She latched on early to the importance of providing affordable sanitary pads and a method for their disposal. Musaazi was in the audience when she described the problem for a group of businessmen, whom she pelted with pads as a humorous wake-up call.
At Namuddu's behest and backed by $78,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation, Musaazi embarked on a two-year research and development odyssey, during which he experimented with materials including water hyacinth (decays too quickly) and elephant grass (requires boiling to break down) before settling on papyrus. "I was very impressed with what he came up with, especially after visiting his first setup at the university, where he had these poor women doing the process and earning extra money," says Namuddu.
Namuddu and Musaazi had counted on the Ugandan Ministry of Education's buying MakaPads and distributing them to students. Musaazi had already piloted the product at 12 schools. But the ministry shrugged them off. Then the Rockefeller Foundation project came to an end, leaving Musaazi to market MakaPads as best he could. A local newspaper wrote about the pads, "and the very next day," Musaazi says, "UNHCR knocked on my door and said, 'I think you have what we've been looking for.' "
In Uganda, the UNHCR is responsible for 40,000 girls and women from ages 12 to 49 living in Kampala and eight refugee settlements. "Up until then, the refugees had been using cloths and rags and nothing," says Maria Mangeni, a community services assistant at the organization. "As in, You dig a hole in the ground and sit right there for three days." Shortly before hearing about MakaPads, Mangeni had traveled among the settlements surveying conditions there. "At that time, we were giving them cotton cloth," says Mangeni. "I saw some of the cloth being used for children's clothes and head scarves. The women said, 'Yeah, how can I use that nice cloth for my monthly period when I can just get a rag?' "
UNHCR immediately ordered 50,000 packets of 10 pads each, an order Musaazi was woefully unprepared to fill. "We were patient," says Mangeni. "I knew we had to do this." Last year, 85 percent of women in the settlements received MakaPads; this year, Mangeni expects to hit 100 percent. UNHCR offices in Kenya, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have expressed interest in setting up their own factories, although production is limited by the availability of papyrus.
Musaazi incorporated T4T in 2007 at the request of UNHCR, which preferred to do business with a company rather than an individual. Today, T4T runs four factories, including one in Gulu District in northern Uganda. That facility, a partnership with a Pentecostal church, employs mainly workers infected with HIV/AIDS. "They are former abductees of the Lord's Resistance Army who were raped or made wives to the rebels," says Juliet Nakibuule, Musaazi's supremely efficient general manager. "We ask employees at that site to name a backup team: a sister or parent we can train to do your job. That way, if you fall sick and can't work, the money still goes to your family."
