Case Study: BeGirl

I met Diana Sierra through my work with Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship. She 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 Jeffery 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 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 the product. But she encountered an unexpected problem: she “realized that there was a big need but no market for reusable menstrual products.” They just didn’t fit into a typical Mozambique and African household budget. “Imagine trying to sell menstrual products in a country/continent where you’re not even allowed to speak about your period at home? Now imagine at a school or government level? No one was familiar with the importance of menstrual health and it’s benefits at all”.

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 and how it leads to girls becoming healthy, productive, well-educated women.

She also worked with regulatory authorities to establish standards for menstrual products as part of establishing 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.”by a government, that’s when you really see numbers take off.”

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.”

Currently, the government of Angola is also working to adopt Be Girl’s curriculum, and her advocacy efforts are being recognized by countries across the African continent. Be Girl has now raised more than three million dollars in capital, distributed over half a million products in thirty five countries, and provided education to 360 thousand adolescents. Her twenty-one-person team is now expanding the Be Girl operation 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.” 

Key Takeaways:

Diana Sierra is an inspirational social entrepreneur, and her BeGirl story has several lessons in it that entrepreneurs of all stripes should take note of:  

• Marry the problem, not the solution. Diana’s north star remained the same—menstrual health leads to all sorts of positive outcomes for girls and women—but she needed to pivot several times with regard to the best way to solve that problem. 

• Selling a product for which there is no existing market for similar products is a challenge. Many first-time entrepreneurs think that having no competition would be great, but in fact creating demand where there isn’t any requires twice the effort. 

• It’s difficult to design and deliver a product into a world you are not immersed in. Diana found that trying to run Be Girl from her NYC office wasn’t going to work. She had to actually be on the ground in Africa to fully immerse herself in the people, governments, and markets that would become partners in her organization’s success.

• Back in Session 2 we talked about how every startup needs to get to Product-Market Fit, and that ultimately you’ll need Product-Market-Channel Fit.  Diana found out that having a great product with PMF doesn’t do you any good until you also find the right channel through which to sell  and distribute it.