On Thursday, June 22, women marched through Accra carrying a demand that turned one of the most private aspects of women's lives into a public policy question: “Don't Tax My Period.”

The demonstration, organised by the Women's Wing of the Socialist Movement of Ghana alongside other organisations, ended at Parliament, where protesters presented a petition calling for taxes on sanitary pads to be removed. Their objection centres partly on the taxes imposed on imported sanitary pads, including a 20 per cent import duty and 12.5 per cent Value Added Tax (VAT). The campaign follows growing calls from civil-society groups and the Ghana Education Service, which in May also called for the removal of the 20 per cent import tax to make sanitary products more affordable.

At first glance, this is a debate about taxation. But walk away from Parliament and into an ordinary Ghanaian household, and the issue becomes more complicated. A packet of sanitary pads does not enter the household budget by itself. It enters alongside food, ECG bills, water, rent, school expenses and transport fares. For a university student, it may compete with feeding money, data or the trotro fare needed to get to lectures. For a mother with three menstruating daughters, one recurring monthly expense becomes four.

Unlike many purchases, menstruation cannot be postponed until there is more money.

That is what makes the current debate about more than the price of sanitary pads. It asks a larger question: what happens when an unavoidable biological process must be managed through resources that are distributed unequally?

Menstruation is biological. Period poverty is social.

The same price, different sacrifice

During this week's campaign, one woman told the Ghana News Agency that purchasing sanitary pads for herself and her three daughters consumed about 10 per cent of her monthly income. A student at the University of Education, Winneba said that buying pads sometimes meant sacrificing money she would otherwise use for food on campus. She also described students resorting to pieces of cloth when they could not afford sanitary pads.

These are individual experiences rather than national estimates, but they illustrate something a price tag cannot capture.

The same packet of sanitary pads can be sold to two women for exactly the same amount and still impose very different costs on their lives.

Consider two university students buying the same packet of pads. One receives enough money from home to cover feeding, transportation, data and personal expenses. The other is already stretching her feeding money until the end of the week. At the pharmacy counter, they are charged equally. Outside it, their circumstances are not equal.

For one, pads are a routine purchase. For the other, buying them may mean skipping lunch, reducing transport money or postponing another need.

This is where class enters menstruation.

In many Ghanaian households, money is already divided among competing necessities. There is food money, transport money, school expenses, electricity, rent and the countless unexpected demands that arrive before the next salary or remittance. Students may simply call much of what they receive chop money, even though it is expected to cover several needs.

Sanitary pads must find a place inside that budget every month.

Availability, therefore, should not be confused with affordability. Finding pads at a pharmacy, supermarket or neighbourhood provision shop tells us that the product exists. It does not tell us what a woman or girl must sacrifice to buy it.

This distinction becomes even more important during Ghana's current cost-of-living pressures. When food and transport are already taking larger portions of household income, a recurring menstrual expense does not disappear. Instead, households must absorb it alongside everything else.

Period poverty is therefore not simply about whether a woman owns a sanitary pad. It is about the resources she possesses to manage menstruation without sacrificing another basic need.

Having a pad is not the same as having menstrual security

The relationship becomes even more interesting when we look at Ghanaian adolescents.

UNICEF's Situation of Adolescents in Ghana reports that more than 90 per cent of adolescent girls have access to appropriate menstrual-hygiene materials. Yet 22 per cent reported that they did not participate in school, work or social activities during their last menstruation.

Those two findings should make us pause.

If access to menstrual materials is relatively high, why are roughly two in ten girls still withdrawing from ordinary activities during their periods?

Part of the answer is that a sanitary pad is only one requirement for managing menstruation.

A schoolgirl also needs water, privacy, a usable toilet and somewhere appropriate to dispose of menstrual materials. She may need help managing menstrual pain. And she needs reasonable confidence that a stain on the back of her uniform will not become a source of ridicule.

Imagine an SHS girl beginning her period halfway through the school day. In a school with clean washrooms, water, functioning doors and disposal facilities, the interruption may be brief. Put the same girl in a school where the washroom lacks privacy or reliable water and her options change. She may wait uncomfortably, ask a female teacher or friend for help, tie a sweater around her waist if she fears she has stained her uniform, or decide to go home.

If she is a day student, going home may mean finding additional trotro fare. If she is in boarding school and her pads have finished before the next visiting day, she may have to depend on a friend, a housemistress, money sent from home or whatever she can purchase nearby.

The biology has not changed.

The institution around her has.

This is why menstruation belongs in conversations about educational inequality. Boys and girls can be admitted to the same school, taught by the same teachers and sit the same WASSCE papers while experiencing the institution differently.

Equality of admission does not automatically produce equality of participation.

And when these interruptions recur monthly, what appears to be one missed lesson can accumulate. The issue is not that menstruation inevitably causes poor educational outcomes. It is that social conditions can turn menstruation into an educational disadvantage.

The problem is not the female body. The problem is what happens when institutions are insufficiently equipped for that body.

When a private matter becomes a public question

There is another dimension that cannot be measured in cedis: stigma.

A girl may have sanitary pads and still feel embarrassed carrying one openly to the washroom. A teenager who depends financially on her father may find it easier to ask her mother, sister or auntie for pads than explain directly to him what she needs. A student experiencing menstrual pain may hesitate to tell a male teacher why she needs to leave class.

This is where culture and economics can reinforce each other. If pads cost money, girls need access to financial resources. If menstruation is simultaneously treated as something that should be discussed quietly, obtaining those resources can become more complicated.

That helps explain why Thursday's demonstration is significant beyond the tax itself.

The protesters did not march to a supermarket or sanitary-pad manufacturer.

They marched to Parliament.

By doing so, they challenged the idea that menstrual management belongs entirely to individual women and their households. Taxes are public decisions. School sanitation is affected by public investment. Menstrual-health education involves public institutions. Policies governing imports and local production influence the market in which sanitary products are sold.

A period may be private.

The conditions under which it is managed are not entirely private.

The campaign also raises an important question about equality. A tax can be applied uniformly while producing unequal effects. Everyone buying a particular imported sanitary pad may face the same tax embedded in its price, but the additional cost does not represent the same sacrifice to every purchaser.

That distinction is particularly important for a product associated with an unavoidable biological need.

Removing the tax is a beginning, not the end

If government removes the taxes campaigners are challenging, one question should immediately follow: will the reduction actually reach women and girls through lower retail prices?

Taxes are only one component of price. Production costs, imported inputs, exchange rates, transportation, distribution and retail margins also matter. Any reform should therefore be followed by evidence: What happens to retail prices? Are locally produced products becoming more affordable? Do women outside Accra experience the same changes? Most importantly, do low-income women and girls say that sanitary products have become easier to afford?

But even cheaper pads would solve only part of the problem.

They cannot put water into a school washroom, repair a broken toilet door, provide disposal facilities or eliminate menstrual stigma. They cannot guarantee that the poorest household can afford pads every month. And they cannot ensure that a boarding student whose supplies unexpectedly finish has somewhere to turn.

This is why Ghana's conversation about period poverty must remain larger than taxation.

Affordability matters. So do household income, school sanitation, menstrual-health education, product availability and the social norms surrounding menstruation. These are not separate problems competing for attention. They interact in the same lives.

The “Don't Tax My Period” protesters carried a simple demand through Accra this week, but the question behind their placards is larger.

What does affordability mean when two women face the same price with radically different incomes? What does equal educational opportunity mean when a girl can enter the same classroom as a boy but may not have the facilities necessary to manage her period comfortably? And when does something treated as a private bodily responsibility become a legitimate public concern?

Period poverty does not begin at the pharmacy counter. It can begin in the household where a mother is dividing money among food, transport, electricity and the needs of several children. It can appear in a boarding-school dormitory when a girl's provisions run out. It can continue in a school washroom without adequate privacy. And it can follow a university student to the food joint when the money she would have used for lunch has already been spent on pads.

On Thursday, women carried those ordinarily private calculations into the streets of Accra and eventually to Parliament.

Whether the taxes will be removed remains to be seen.

But whatever happens next, Ghana should resist reducing period poverty to the price printed on a packet of sanitary pads.

Menstruation is biological. Period poverty is not.

It is produced where gender meets income, where the body meets institutions, and where private needs meet public policy.