OUR STORY

In 2012, while working in Uganda, founder and industrial designer Diana Sierra witnessed something that couldn’t be ignored: girls were dropping out of school simply because they had nothing to manage their periods.

Looking deeper, it became clear that while access to books or shoes mattered, their impact was limited when a girl’s reality, her body, was being overlooked, denied, or stigmatized. Without addressing this fundamental barrier, inequality would persist, starting in the classroom and shaping the course of a girl’s life.

Working side by side with girls, Diana uncovered a deeper truth: the challenge wasn’t just access to products. Girls were already finding ways to manage their periods, showing resilience, resourcefulness, and ingenuity with whatever materials they had. What was needed was not to replace those solutions, but to build on them.

Using locally available materials, including umbrella fabric and mosquito net, she developed the first prototype: a reusable holder designed to safely adapt to any absorbent material girls had on hand. A solution designed for real life, for their bodies, their environments, and their realities.

Through multiple iterations, co-created and tested with the girls themselves, a new kind of product emerged, practical, high-performing, and dignified. In that moment, its impact was clear when one girl said: “What I like best — it makes me proud to be girl.”

Inspired by that sentiment and grounded in the belief that every girl has the right to feel confident and proud every day of the month, Be Girl was founded in 2014.

Today, Be Girl is a women-led social enterprise building the systems that make menstrual health work, combining products, knowledge, and data to expand access, shift norms, and unlock opportunity at scale.

We exist to serve the more than 250 million adolescent girls who still lack access to appropriate, high-performance menstrual solutions, and to ensure that nothing stands in their way.