Sparśa: A Social and Environmental Business Model for Compostable Menstrual Pads Production in Nepal

Banana plants are harvested for fruit only once, leaving large trunks behind. Traditionally, these are left to rot or burned, adding to pollution and waste. Sparśa has turned this challenge into an opportunity: we partner with farmers in Susta municipality, Nepal, to collect trunks as raw material for our compostable pads. Through a simple agreement, farmers provide trunks free of charge, and in return, Sparśa removes the agro-waste from their plantations and trains farmers in making bio-compost from remaining residues. This improves soil fertility, reduces open burning, and creates cleaner plantations — while securing a steady flow of fibers for pad production.

This step demonstrates how an agricultural byproduct can be reintegrated into a value chain that benefits health, the environment, and livelihoods, while creating a replicable model for circular farming. The knowledge collected here is not limited to menstrual pads; the same sourcing and processing techniques can be adapted to produce other fiber-based products, such as textiles, packaging, or handicrafts, thereby broadening opportunities for local green industries in low- and middle-income countries.

The details of fiber sourcing, drying, and preparation will be presented in a dedicated PANORAMA solution on ‘Sustainable Fiber Processing’ (Scheduled to be published for November 2025). The next stage — how fibers are transformed into banana paper with machinery designed and built for our own factory — will be shared in PANORAMA solution ‘From Natural Fibre to Paper’ (also due November 2025). Together, these solutions document the earliest stages of Sparśa’s pad production process and make them open source for replication.

Once banana fibers are prepared, the next step is to transform them into banana paper and menstrual pads. Sparśa developed and built its own production line in Nepal — combining machinery for fiber pulping, pressing, drying, paper-making, and pad assembly. Because some of this equipment did not exist on the market, our team designed machines from scratch in collaboration with skilled workshops in Kathmandu, adapting them for small-scale, cost-effective production. Locally designed paper-making equipment and pad-shaping machines were prototyped, tested, and refined in real factory conditions.

This engineering innovation is at the heart of Sparśa’s model: it proves that advanced machinery can be developed locally, reducing dependency on costly imports and strengthening Nepal’s industrial capacity. From paper moulds and deckles to pad-shaping machines, each design was prototyped, tested, and refined in real factory conditions. By making these designs openly available, we ensure that other initiatives worldwide can replicate production using locally sourced fibers.

This step is already showcased in PANORAMA solution ‘Engineering for the Production of Compostable Pads’, where readers can follow the full workflow from banana paper to absorbent core to finished pad. Further technical details, including CAD files and full documentation of the ‘From Natural Fibre to Paper: A Practical Solution Centered on Equipment Design for Small-Scale Production’ will be provided as a separate PANORAMA solution page to be published by November 2025, offering practical, step-by-step guidance for replicating both equipment design and small-scale production processes.

At the core of Sparśa’s innovation is a commitment to listening to users. A nationwide survey of 820 women and girls provided critical insights into menstrual practices, preferences, and unmet needs. This research guided the first pad prototypes and shaped every design decision — from absorbency and comfort to cultural acceptance and compostability. Each prototype underwent testing in both laboratory conditions and community settings, striking a balance between hygiene standards and user expectations.

To ensure scientific credibility, Sparśa established its own testing protocols and partnered with certified laboratories to validate the safety and performance of its products. Results were documented and openly shared, supporting not only our product development but also providing evidence-based knowledge for NGOs, policymakers, and social enterprises working in the field of menstrual health. This user-driven, research-based approach is documented in detail in Defining a Good Menstrual Pad: A User-Centered R&D Process in Nepal, which explains how field research, prototyping, and quality assurance intersect to define standards for sustainable menstrual products.

Sparśa is designed as a women-led, non-profit social business that integrates environmental protection, menstrual equity, and economic empowerment. The enterprise is aimed at creating ~16 direct green jobs for women in both rural fiber processing and urban pad production. Its structure ensures that decision-making power remains with local women, embedding gender justice into the heart of the business.

A defining feature of the model is the reinvestment of profits into education and awareness campaigns, linking financial performance directly with social impact. By doing so, Sparśa builds a sustainable cycle in which production funds awareness, awareness drives acceptance, and acceptance supports market growth. At the same time, the enterprise faces the challenge of competing with cheap, plastic-based imports — which dominate 98% of the Nepali market — making financial planning, partnerships, and strategic positioning essential.

This block connects directly to the published PANORAMA solution Sparśa Business Model: Gender-Responsive Entrepreneurship and Market Access, which delves deeper into the practical aspects of building a social enterprise in Nepal. It includes lessons on forming strategic partnerships with government bodies and NGOs, financial planning and reinvestment strategies, setting up production units, and navigating market entry in an environment dominated by cheap plastic imports.

Compostable pads alone are not enough to create change — awareness and dialogue must go hand in hand with product innovation. To address this, Sparśa launched the Ambassador Program, a youth-led initiative that trains young women and men from local communities to become educators and advocates for menstrual health. After intensive training in SRHR, facilitation, and leadership, Ambassadors design and deliver sessions tailored to schools and community groups, using storytelling, games, scientific explanations, and product demonstrations to make menstruation a topic that can be spoken about openly.

In its first year of operation, the program trained 20 Ambassadors who reached 70+ schools, 7,500 students, and 1,500 adults with stigma-reduction sessions. Both boys and girls are included in school workshops to normalize menstruation and build empathy, while adult sessions focus on myth-busting and dialogue. Beyond knowledge transfer, Ambassadors gain leadership, public speaking, and facilitation skills that strengthen their own futures.

The initiative is described in detail in the published PANORAMA solution Sparśa Ambassador Program: Youth-Led Menstrual Health Education and Stigma Reduction in Nepal. That solution provides practical insights for replication, explaining how to recruit and train Ambassadors from within their own communities, how to engage schools and community leaders to secure legitimacy, and how to design education that is age-appropriate for students while also creating dialogue-based sessions for adults. It also shares lessons on sustaining motivation, offering mentorship, and building long-term community trust.

While Sparśa in Nepal serves as a pilot enterprise, NIDISI’s ambition reaches far beyond one country. Years of networking with practitioners, academics, social entrepreneurs, and NGOs showed us that many projects across the Global South are working with natural fibres — banana, sisal, water hyacinth, bamboo — yet most face similar challenges: how to process fibres efficiently, ensure product quality, secure market access, and build financially sustainable social businesses. To address this, we launched the Sparśa Blueprint Project, which creates a global community of knowledge sharing for compostable pad manufacturing.

The Blueprint is where Sparśa’s technical expertise, R&D, and social business lessons are opened up for replication. It documents machinery CAD files, sourcing strategies, financial planning models, and outreach approaches, but also creates space for dialogue and co-creation. Connecting projects across the globe enables local innovators to learn from each other and adapt the model to their own contexts and fibre plants.

First building block of Journey of Community Building: Creating a Globally Adaptable Blueprint Model for Fibre Pad Manufacturing — will be published on the PANORAMA platform in September 2025, and a full solution page will follow in November 2025. There, we will share the accumulated experience of years of building networks across continents, including insights from collaborations with grassroots entrepreneurs, academic partners such as Stanford University’s Prakash Lab and LGP2 from the Grenoble INP-Pagora, NGOs, and local governments. This scaling of our project will serve as the gateway for replication, helping others create their own fibre-based pad enterprises.