Myna Mahila Foundation is located in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. We currently have three centres spread across Mumbai – in Bandra, Chembur, and our headquarters in Govandi.

We’re a social enterprise, running as a non-profit. As a financially sustainable organisation, we try to provide employment opportunities to vulnerable women across low-income communities in India. Legally, we are registered as a Section-8 company in India. Our profits from sales go back into our impact programs.

We are a women-run organisation. Our staff strength is 30 women, out of which, 50% of the staff is employed in our pad production unit from the urban slums, thereby improving local livelihood. We have over 50 women volunteers involved in education and distribution of packets, and need as much help here as we can get! 

If you live in Mumbai and want to work or volunteer with us, please see our Careers page. We love learning from others, and hopefully we can share some of our experiences with you too!

If you live outside Mumbai (and/or outside India), please contribute to our Blog with your stories and experiences around women’s health issues. We would also love your support on our social media platforms to share the Myna voice. 

If you’re studying in high school or are a college/university student, you can apply for our Ambassador Program to join our movement, represent Myna and drive social impact on your campuses. The program is open to students residing in India and globally.  

Thank you for understanding the importance of our initiatives! You can fundraise for specific initiatives and campaigns, such as the Sponsor a Girl campaign. For supporting fundraisers, you can create an online fundraiser via Ketto, and other popular crowdfunding channels in India.

If you are not in India and want to fundraise, please contact us as we would need to verify the source and country of origin per FCRA mandate.

No. We are a charity implementation organization that runs its own programs.

We provide one newspaper bag for every pad sold (a packet of 7 will contain 7 newspaper bags). We make sure to teach every girl and woman to wrap the pads in the newspaper bag and dispose of them in the dust bin. We encourage women to keep a separate packet or dust bin for their sanitary waste.

We avoid the use of plastic to the extent possible. We understand the problem is of disposal, so we concentrate on making sure people throw the pads appropriately (not flush down the toilet or out of the window!). Our pads are biodegradable but not entirely compostable. We are conducting research to use more compostable materials that are cost-effective.

While we would love to promote the use of reusable materials, such as menstrual cups, these alternatives are not feasible to promote in the low-income communities we work in, where access to water, let alone hot water, is limited. Menstrual cups need to be kept very sterile, otherwise they can cause many infections.

Reusable cloth pads have a similar problem where people do not have access to hot water to wash them and do not dry them under direct sunlight (rather under the bed or in the bathroom). Hence, damp and/or infected cloth is reused and can cause infections, such as Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs).