Priyanshu Pokhrel ’26: Changing Lives, One Menstrual Pad at a Time

Content warning: This article discusses sexual violence.

By Social Innovation Lab Fellows

Dec 5, 2024

This week, the Social Innovation Lab sat down with Priyanshu Pokhrel ’26, the co-founder of Pyari. A recipient of the 2024 New Venture Award, Pyari empowers women and girls in Syangja, Nepal, by ensuring that every menstruator has a dignified period regardless of their socio-economic status.

Social Innovation Lab: Hello! Can you introduce yourself, your name, pronouns, major, class year and your role in Pyari? 

Priyanshu Pokhrel: Hi, my name is Priyanshu. I am a junior at Wesleyan. I study economics and data science. I use she/her pronouns, and I am the co-founder and executive director of Pyari.

SIL: Can you tell us a little bit of what Pyari is, what you guys do, and its mission?

PP: So, in a sentence, we want to make sexual and reproductive health education fun. That’s all we do. We want to make it fun, engaging, and creative, and we want to approach it from a different perspective from what people have done before. We work on menstruation and period rights right now, because that’s where we decided that we wanted to enter the scene of SRHR (sexual & reproductive health rights) from. 

We do workshops primarily—for schools, institutions, organizations, companies, and wherever people—menstruators and non-menstruators—can come together.

SIL: Amazing. How did it all start? I know it’s pretty recent.

PP: It’s been a little bit over a year, I think. So it actually started at Yale, when Pyari’s founder, Nikita Paudel, wanted to do something around menstruation, because even though she belonged to the diaspora community—she mostly grew up here [in the U.S.]—menstruation taboos and all of that were still very prevalent in her community here, so she started thinking about it, and she wanted to go back to her hometown in Nepal and work on it.

I think I met her for the first time in March 2023 during an event. We just started talking, and I think a month later, I was like, “You know, I wanna join.” That’s how it started. Then we worked for an entire year after that to actually formally structure it. And we started it this summer—[Pyari’s] official launch was on May 28.

SIL: Congratulations! Why do you think menstrual education is important?

PP: Menstruation is a very big taboo topic in Nepal and many other regions of the world, and it’s primarily based on the fact that when you bleed, it’s like impure blood—so you’re impure and can’t be touched, and the things you touch also consequently become impure. The patriarch has menstruators isolated when they’re on their periods, because he doesn’t want them participating in any duties. It’s been going on for generations. I personally had to face all those restrictions myself, but the larger, expanded version of the restrictions was when women had to isolate themselves in caves and cow sheds, there were a lot of sexual violence cases—but also death, because wild animals would attack them. There’s a lot of activism work that is done on this, but we haven’t really seen any critical, tangible change. So we’ve had to go back and analyze: Where’s the actual primary issue of the problem? And we see that it is in education. 

SIL: Indeed. So what’s behind the specific ways you do menstrual education?

PP: So we did the needs assessment in our hometown, and there was this one incident that I remember when we were interviewing these four or five girls at a school. Most of the girls were like, “Oh, we face all these restrictions, it’s really hard, and our parents don’t understand.” But there was this girl who was from the ethnic group that didn’t have any of these restrictions. She was like, “You know, in my family, my mom doesn’t let me follow these restrictions, but I come to school and I see all these girls all talking about having to deal with them, so it’s more of a social experience for them, and I felt left out. So I went home and I told my mom that I wanted to follow these restrictions.”

It was just a mindblowing moment for us. It’s kind of a part of our community now, and we can’t go into the community being biased. That’s been the rhetoric all the time—usually foreigners and international NGOs going to these places, and being like, “This is bad. What you’re doing is stupid.” And they just try to force these foreign ideas upon the locals [to make them] not follow restrictions. We were like, “We have to do something different,” because this is clearly not working, and people still want these traditions in their lives. 

So then we further investigated, and we found that the government of Nepal removed the health subject from the ninth- and 10th-grade curriculum—that was where they had, if any, sex ed information. I remember when I was in school, it was like a page or so, [even though] I went to a good school in the city. In schools in the villages, all they talked about, again, was restrictions and not the factual stuff. So we were like, “If we’re gonna tackle the restrictions, we have to make people question the restrictions themselves, rather than us telling them that it’s wrong.” That’s why we started to work on education. 

We were also thinking about the patriarch—how to involve men in menstruation. We want to bring the boys into the conversation. But why do you, as a boy who does not bleed, want to be a part of this? If you’re just in the room, you’re just gonna make noise—that was what they did in our very first session. Nobody was listening. But then we realized it was because they were never taught how to feel empathetic towards someone else’s experience. Specifically, as a boy and a girl, you’re separated your entire time in school. I had seen from my other friends’ experience that, in a class, you have the boy sitting on one side or the girl sitting on the other side, who don’t interact. If you’re seen walking on the same staircase, you’ll be asked, “Why are you talking to each other and all this?” 

And how do we bring them together so that they understand that this is something that's important to them as well? The next day we started, we put the boys and girls next to each other. We were gonna alternate—they would sit girl, boy, girl, boy, girl, boy. So then the boys were like, “Okay, now there’s someone next to me who goes through this, and she’s paying attention, so I also need to pay attention.”

But it is not enough to just sit them together and lecture them. So then we introduced the interaction. We actually made them touch the products and demonstrate how you use it: How do you put a mental cup in? How do you take it out? A lot of people question why men need to know this and say this is vulgar. The answer to that is that they’re gonna grow up. They, as someone who holds power, as the patriarch, have the ability to teach and change. Not just that, when they grow up, they’re going to maybe have a daughter and not always have a menstruator in the house who can teach the child. It’s important for everybody.

My dad owns a pharmacy in Kathmandu and sells these sanitary pads —making business out of that—but we still don’t talk about it, ever. We had to give them more incentives. We were like, “Let’s make it fun.” We’d have a game, and if you win, there’s something for you—even if it’s not a gift, you’ve still won so it’s interesting. There’s also drawing and acting, and students don’t have these experiences usually in school, because it’s mostly just studying. There was this one particular boy, whose teachers would come and tell us, “Oh, he’s not good at this stuff. He’s very bad at studying.” But then he was the one who really stood out because we were doing art—drawing and acting—and he would just take the mic any chance he got and speak. It was important that we had the fun component. 

SIL: We noticed that there’s a lot of collaboration and partnership in your work. Can you tell us more about that

PP: Obviously, the biggest partnerships are with the universities, Wesleyan and Yale—or their entrepreneurship centers, Patricelli Center [for Social Entrepreneurship (PCSE)] and Tsai CITY (Center for Innovative Thinking), respectively. They have been helping us fund this. And none of this would have been possible without them. But also, different departments across campus have been giving us grants and support for this work. 

Then, I think, come the local partners in Nepal. The first project we did in school was with the local government of that region and with another environmental organization to teach girls how to make their own reusable pads. These were very critical for us, because the school was a public school and wouldn’t really let you conduct a program without a written permission from the government. We actually got that a year ago, because we knew that this would be a big hassle. The other organization is the biggest research-based organization in Nepal when it comes to environmental issues, sustainability, and climate change, and one of their wings is menstrual health management, because a big thing that goes unnoticed is the amount of plastic and waste that comes out of period products. They had been doing a lot of research around that and had this huge display of the different kinds of mental products available in the country and how toxic it was for both your health and the environment. And all the pads were in the red zone. In the city it is okay, but in the rural areas, there are some local Nepali companies that will come up with a random pad that will not be tested, and the government doesn’t know. And then you have pads that are moldy, just not great quality—a lot of bleach used, and a lot of infections too. At a school, the girls told us that the government gives the public schools free pads all over the country, but the pads that they give are of very low quality—when you take out the wrapper, the entire pad would tear up. 

This summer, when we went back to the mayor’s office to talk, he knew that we were coming and invited his nephew, a pad distributor not just in that region but the entire province. We started telling him about our reusable pad training, and the nephew was like, “You shouldn’t do this. You should give them trash cans so they can dispose properly,” because disposal is another big issue. Us not teaching them about sustainable products or reusable pads meant that his business would not be growing. It was just like a big mafia game. And one of the biggest political leaders’ son runs a sanitary pad business in Nepal like—it’s insane and so politicized. So when you are entering the market, like, you’re actively engaging with so many stakeholders across the region. 

Another partnership was with the school itself. It was actually the school where Nikita’s grandfather taught, and where her mom went to school as well. So we wanted to start from there, because she always says this: “If the school didn’t exist, I would not exist.” The school was very receptive. The students really loved us. 

One other thing I really want to bring into attention is that if you’re just going to work in the rural areas, your work is never going to get out to the public that can actually create the change. That’s what I learned in my environmental politics class (Environmental Politics in East Asia, GOVT 273), actually—so huge credit to [John E. Andrus Professor of Government Mary Alice] Haddad as well. You have to start a movement in the urban center. We actually did our launch event in the capital city—we had set it up in a park, and 200 people came and drew something on a blank canvas that turned out to be a big, beautiful painting. When we came back, we gathered six or seven celebrities in the city—we had that network, so we could mobilize that—and did a very creative, intimate workshop in partnership with a museum in the city. 

We did not pay for any of these partnerships; we just spoke, and they were all really interested. And when all the celebrities posted about it at the same time, everybody was like, “Okay, what is this organization?” The word was out, and then one thing after another, the video went viral. One of the celebrities from the event launched this thing called “Women in Concert,” and she was having her final showcase at a school and invited us to do a workshop for them. Then, she got us into a partnership with another school. After we did that, there was this other event that we were invited to. So it’s just been very natural for us—we haven’t really been seeking people as much as they have been seeking us right now.

Our partnerships are not just in the local region, but also diasporic wise as well. We had connections with The Great Nepali Diaspora, a big organization connecting all the diasporic communities around the world, and the founder highlighted us as well. A lot of people now know that we exist, or have awareness of it, at least. 

And I also want to highlight the team behind Pyari. None of this would have been possible without the team. The first person we got into the team after the two of us was an artist. I used to look at her TikTOks, because she would make art. And she was so observant in the outer world—looking at people and drawing them up. To see someone do that, it’s so cool. So I saw all her work for the last four years, I think, mostly during Covid. And I told Nikita that I wanted her. I didn’t know what I wanted her specifically for, but I wanted her regardless. And so I reached out to her, and she was very nice to respond, and we really clicked in the first two meetings we had, and we were just like, “Okay, let’s do it.” So it started informally, and then we needed someone to do graphic design, primarily because I wanted to start our social media in some capacity. I didn't want to just start it without any coherence or structure, because that does not work out. You struggle a lot afterwards if you want to add structure to what’s already existing, so I wanted to approach it with a structured form. And when I told her that, she said she’s not a graphic designer but has another friend who does this and work on projects together. So I said, “Cool. Bring her in, too.” She came in, and it just grew from there. They’re the actual people in the field—the four of them who work really closely with us. They’re the people driving it right now, and we couldn’t be where we are without them. So big, big credits to them. I think our biggest investment has been on the team, more so than just conducting programs. They feel like they’re in a comfortable position to bring up their ideas and actually execute it.

SIL: Wow. It’s super cool to get these insights from behind the scenes. Let’s now talk more specifically about our campus—what kind of resources at Wesleyan did you utilize when starting Pyari that shaped your thinking?

PP: The idea of getting involved started when I first talked with [PCSE Director] Ahmed [Badr] my freshman spring. After we talked, I got the PCSE micro-grant the first year which covered everything for our 10-day field research. And Ahmed really gave us the opportunity to connect with his network, which was really, really valuable. And the first event that we went to was the Proximate Leadership Forum at the 78th UN [Session], and I met someone from Nepal there. I talked to her, and she was very enthusiastic about [my project]. We’re still good friends now. It’s just those little connections that Ahmed has given—so big, huge, huge credit goes to Ahmed, in big bold letters.

In terms of other resources, for me personally, it’s definitely been my environment politics class with Professor Haddad, because we talked about a lot of sustainable practices in cities. I told her about our project towards the end of the class only, but she was really excited about it, and she also connected me with people left and right. So honestly, just a lot of conversations that you have with people, and your idea evolves. 

Another thing that comes to my mind is applying to multiple grants, even if you’re getting rejected. I think Pyari evolved as an idea as we were going through different competitions. Our initial idea really was to create a hub in Nikita’s village and just have women employed there to make reusable pads for the community and everywhere else, and we really didn’t know how the logistics of that would work, and it seemed like a lot of tasks because it’s manufacturing and we’re not there [physically]. And then the idea evolved so rapidly once we first went to apply for the Davis Project for Peace. We didn’t get it but were finalists, and it really made us think what was wrong with this idea, or, what can be changed to make it better. We applied with the same idea to Startup Yale just because they said they would give us free feedback, and we just needed the feedback. But we became one out of the four finalists. Again, we didn’t win, but when we once became finalists, we were kind of forced to evolve our idea. After Startup Yale, I think Pyari got more form, Then we took the same page to new ventures, and then we won. PCSE would also fund my travel, and even small things like that can help as resources. 

So It’s honestly a process, and multiple people who have supported us throughout while we created our page. There was this one guy who was an ex-consultant and led the Environmental Studies Department at Yale, who sat with us for three hours before our Startup Yale pitch. He would question every sentence we were saying and every slide, and that just made you think. One of our main taglines, which is like, “When you pair pads with education, it can change lives.” It actually came out while we’re talking with him in a conversation, where Nikita just randomly said that line, and he was like, “Write that down.” And so it’s, again, conversations that happen, and what you get out of it.

Also, we were part of the Venture Development Program Launchpad at Tsai CITY. That helped us out, because they go through different phases with you in developing your venture in terms of mission, vision, and all of that stuff. We did that for the whole semester last spring. [People at Tsai CITY] are invested in creating something. And you have resources for everything; it’s almost overwhelming how much they have and how many meetings you have to go to. It’s kind of too much, but you never know, you’ll get something out of one of those meetings. 

SIL: That’s amazing. We’re also curious about the biggest challenges that you have encountered so far?

PP: So the first event, the public art campaign, the launch event—we wanted to do it in a very historic cultural site in Nepal. So we knew that there would be complications with it, because these are placed with temples or religious spaces. And the big idea is that you can go near any of the spaces when you’re on your periods. But this is also a tourist destination—one of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites and stuff. So we wanted to do it there, and we knew that they had spaces to do a canvas. We went to the Conservation Committee, and it was all women there that day. They [connected us] to this other company who had booked that space and was okay with sharing [a part of it with us]. We were asked to come back the next day to sign a letter with the head of the office. We had to launch Pyari on May 28 regardless because that was Menstrual Health Management Day. Two days before the event, I went in with a letter, and the men were there this time with one of the same women, who said “Your program can’t be done here.” I was like, “Why?” And the men started talking: “We can’t allow stuff like this in the space. You can’t come into the religious site because people are going to protest.” We were like,  “Exactly, we want to challenge that notion.” And again, we were not screaming about this; we were being very intentional and very respectful of the space.

So I was like, “Okay, we won’t do it in the temples, fine. Can you give us a space nearby so it still counts?” They [declined, saying,] “You can’t do it anywhere inside our borders.” I responded, “Okay, if you’re gonna deny me the space, at least give me a valid reason for it.” And then, they didn’t have an answer, so they just resorted to screaming at me. A man got up from his seat, started chasing me out of the office, and was like, “If you want to argue, just go to the higher ups and complain about it. Don’t show your face here. Who gives you the audacity to come here and talk?” And I was just like, “I am not scared of you. You can’t do anything. It’s not that serious.” But he just wouldn’t get it.

So now the bigger problem was to find a space like this in the next day so that we could do the event that following day. So I was going back home on a bus and saw this park, and I was like, “Oh my god, if we could do it here, it would be really cool.” And then I went to the municipal government’s office. Initially, what our application letter said was “On the auspicious occasion of mental health management day, we want to do a public art event on menstruation.” This one [we submitted] said, “On the auspicious occasion of Republic Day, we want to do a wome’'s health public art campaign.” None of it is wrong. It was also Republic Day. We gave that letter and [got approved].

The big knowledge from this is basically that you can’t fight the system always, and you can’t really go into a place and start screaming, which obviously I did as well. I was like, “If you scream at me, I want to scream at you. If you give me a valid argument, maybe I’ll sit and have a good conversation with you. But if you don’t, and if you don’t respect me, I’m not going to respect you.” Because I also understood that, yes, this is a sensitive topic for people, and I’m not going to go into a space that doesn’t want me, because the whole idea, again, is that we don’t want to force people to believe in our ideas when this is so deeply rooted in the tradition. 

When we [held the launch event], it was actually better, because it was the right amount of people, whereby we could talk to them properly and teach them. It was more men than women who participated. And there were people from probably age three to 80. We met this really old gynecologist, and he told us about his work. He was just sitting there watching everybody paint, and it was just very healing for everybody to come and see all of that. It was a very good start. After that one challenge [with space], all the other challenges were minimal, because we were intentional about getting all the permission before we did this stuff. You could say stuff that maybe hurt me personally, but it doesn’t really affect the work that we do. At the end of it, you need to get the work done—what’s going to help you do the work, more so than fighting literally everyone to prove one small point, which is not worth it. Not everybody’s gonna agree with you.

SIL: Agreed. Looking forward, what do you hope to see from Pyari? Also, what policy changes, in an ideal world, are you hoping to see regarding menstrual health in Nepal?

PP: So there’s a law that criminalizes the segregation of women, especially into the caves and the cow sheds. They can’t control the households, but at least they try, so that already exists. But I think we want to work more on the education policy side of things, because the root problem exists there. So our plan, basically, is to create an educational curriculum that can be implemented in schools. It’s not just gonna be a book or something; our plan is to create an educational kit that would have all the games, all the workshops that we do, DIY stuff, digital resources, booklets, and everything that you need to know about menstruation and, if all things go well, sex ed. So like, all of the stuff you can find in this one packaged kit. It can’t be limited to just two pages only in your book which you don’t even go through and people don’t know about. 

A lot of videos on sex ed have started to come up in the Nepalese social media, which makes me curious if we started this, but I was just watching a video recently about a boy who wrote an anonymous op-ed about his violent rapist [fantasies] because this is all that he’s been seeing, getting pleasure from, and nobody’s really correcting him on what’s wrong and what’s right. And you see this directly causing all the sexual violence cases not just in Nepal, but the South Asia region as a whole. When we started our work, there was this big case in India that took over the internet. Every day some of that stuff is happening, and there’re political leaders involved in rape cases. And it’s just wild to think that literally, every friend I talked to has had one or multiple sexual abuse experiences growing up. 

I don’t think it’s an individual issue. You have to tackle the system before you start announcing capital punishment to a rapist. That is not solving the rape problem. Our idea, at the end of the day, for Pyari’s future is a government adoption of the kits that we produce. And right now, in Kathmandu, after the new mayor was elected, he started these “Book-Free Fridays” when, every Friday, kids get to learn soft skills, and maybe pottery and extracurricular stuff outside of books. And so our plan is to incorporate some of Pyari’s work in the “Book-Free Fridays” events, but maybe that’ll be for the next year.

SIL: The next few questions are more personal. How has working with Pyari shaped your view on social entrepreneurship and community impact? 

PP: I really resonated with the stuff that we learned in class (Leadership & Social Innovation: Patricelli Center Impact Fellowship, CSPL 252) about how you need to fall in love with the problem as the first step. I don’t think I fell in love with the problem for the first half of ideation, at least, and because it’s almost like you want to have this glorified problem that you want to solve, and you want to have this big solution all the time. But then for me, a big realization was that you just need to understand the problem better. And you need to know, What input and unique solution that you can provide. That was a big thing for me in terms of how I see social entrepreneurship, because, again, there’re a lot of organizations in Nepal working on menstruation. Nobody is doing the work that we’re doing. And that speaks volume.

When so many people are doing it, you see a very short-term impact, but we want to see a long-lived impact. 

Execution wise, I think I have learned a lot as a person. At the end of the day, I’m still a student, and I still don’t know a lot of stuff. I think I’ve also fallen in love with the process, and not just the result of it. It’s the people that you work with that make you fall in love with the process. Growing up, they always valued the result more than the effort you put in. I don’t know if this is like all Asian households, and I also had that mentality—talking with Nikita, who grew up here, I caught myself thinking that. And I had to shift my ideas of growth and success. 

I’ve also been learning how to handle conflicts better. It’s not always so happy and good. As a team, just the two of us, we’re so different from each other in terms of how we think. But that’s our biggest strength, because if it was just me doing this stuff, I feel like so many things would have gone wrong, and if it was just her as well, so many things could have gone wrong. So we add different perspectives, and then we now have other team members who can jump in and add more perspectives to find the middle ground. 

Another big thing is how to form a team, how to delegate tasks effectively, how to not always budge in and try to do everything yourself, and how to not micromanage. We have three full time employees now and an intern, and, I think, a circle of 100+ volunteers. So how you manage that network of people and how you talk with employees, all of whom are older than us, are [crucial]. We’re like friends working together, but you also have to manage that hierarchy and professional boundaries. So it’s a lot of learning. I probably have to sit down and write a book about this. I want to.

SIL: Based on the work you’ve done, what advice—or wisdom—would you give to students aspiring to be social entrepreneurs or to someone that just wants to start something?

PP: I don’t know how to phrase it right, but the biggest lesson that I’ve learned is: Don’t try to solve all the problems at once. Don’t try to aim for the stars. Come up with the easiest solution, and make it better. Because the easiest solution is also the easiest to execute, and that really pushes you into action. A lot of people can come up with ideas, but there’s a really limited number of people who, as you say in the startup world, go from zero to one and put what you have thought about into action. Unless you do that, nothing is going to work. And you want to make that step easy, because once that’s already done, and you know how to do it, you can look forward to the next step. If you just are like, “Oh, I need to establish a team with 100 people before I start this,” “I need to develop a whole app,” or, “I need to have 50 clients registered for presale,” it’s never going to work out. You know, you don’t have all the resources. The solution might not be perfect, but you should be okay with that. You can fail, and you should be okay with that too. Your idea will change a lot, and you should be okay with that too. Don’t obsess over the idea, obsessed with the problem. 

SIL: Whoa.

PP: So, in short: One, come up with the easiest solution and make it better. Second, obsessed with the problem, not the solution.

SIL: Amazing. Our last question: How can the Wesleyan community get involved and support Pyari’s mission in small or big ways?

PP: Interesting; I had not thought about this. It was really cool because one of our Wesleyan students came to Nepal with us last, like, this summer, and he made a documentary for us—and another documentary about my mom, because he was staying at my place. And it was cool. But you know, there’re avenues like that where you can be involved. I know that a lot of Wesleyan students are creatives. So in any of the art or creative [spheres], if you want to be involved, I think there’s ample opportunity, because our company, as much as it’s a menstrual health management and education company, it’s a creative agency, equally. So we need ideas. We need creativity. If you have ideas in terms of creative education or hands-on learning, just talk to me, and we can come up with something cool.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Priyanshu Pokhrel ’26 is a 2024 New Venture Award recipient and can be reached at ppokhrel@wesleyan.edu.