Be Girl

Diana Sierra grew up in rural Colombia, earned a degree in industrial and product design, and ended up in NYC, where she designed and engineered products for some very large global brands. After watching how the big corporate world operated, she became interested in sustainability and worked toward a master's in sustainability management from Columbia University — she went from Colombia to Columbia!

At Columbia, she met the renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs and accompanied him and other students to Uganda. She was eager to put her product design skills towards projects that would deliver social impact, and on that trip she found a problem she became obsessed with solving: menstrual health. All over the developing world, this frequently becomes a factor in the gender-driven academic achievement gap — girls who miss several days of school every month because of a biological function start to lag behind their non-menstruating peers.

Diana launched a social venture, Be Girl, with a mission of making sure that "being a girl does not stand in the way of opportunities, health, and success." She used her design skills to develop a reusable product that could deliver long-term performance and protection at a price point that made sense for women and girls living at the base of the pyramid in emerging economies.

She initially launched Be Girl from her home in NYC with a model like Toms Shoes — she marketed the product to American consumers, promising that each one purchased would result in one being given away for free to someone in Africa. Unfortunately, that model never really took off, and eventually Diana decided that to really achieve impact, she needed to actually be immersed in the world she was serving. She packed up her apartment and moved to Mozambique.

Diana continued to iterate on the product design, and the feedback was very positive — women and girls who tested it said they were very happy with it. However, she encountered an unexpected problem.

"Imagine trying to sell menstrual products in a country where you're not even allowed to speak about your period at home. No one was familiar with the importance of menstrual health and its benefits at all." — Diana Sierra, founder of Be Girl

She had realized that there was a big need but no market for reusable menstrual products — they just didn't fit into a typical Mozambique household budget. Diana then extended the design reach of Be Girl from menstrual products to education services, focusing on the development of educational materials and other tools to teach girls, parents, and communities about the importance of menstrual health. She also worked with regulatory authorities to establish standards for menstrual products as part of building a market where there hadn't been one before.

"As a product designer," she says, "I thought my product was so awesome that it would sell itself. I found out that the path is actually consumer awareness, education, advocacy, product standards, and then commercialization."

Mozambique eventually adopted Be Girl's menstrual health curriculum into official government programs. "As a social entrepreneur trying to achieve change at scale," she says, "when your own education material gets adopted by a government, that's when you really see numbers take off." The government of Angola is also working to adopt Be Girl's curriculum, and advocacy efforts are being recognized across the African continent.

Her twenty-one-person team is now expanding Be Girl into West Africa. Reflecting back on her journey, Diana says, "I think that ignorance is bliss when it comes to social entrepreneurship, in a way, because if you know in the beginning how complex it will be, you may never do it."