Evaluating Supply Models for Sustainable Menstrual Products in Chinese Secondary Schools

Abstract

Menstrual health has been defined by the World Health Organization and related international agencies as a comprehensive public health framework encompassing access to menstrual products, adequacy of sanitation facilities, relevant knowledge education, and a supportive social environment. Globally, approximately 1.9 billion women and girls of reproductive age experience menstruation, of whom roughly 500 million lack access to a complete support system meeting menstrual health needs. In Chinese secondary schools, menstrual product supply still relies primarily on individual student purchases, with limited institutional engagement by schools. Although sustainable menstrual products offer long-term cost advantages, their high initial purchase costs create a structural contradiction with the lack of independent income sources among secondary school students, forming liquidity constraints. Meanwhile, the environmental negative externalities of disposable products are not internalized in market prices, and the charitable donation model is constrained by unstable funding sources and low institutionalization. This paper adopts a comparative institutional analysis framework, integrating liquidity constraint theory, environmental externality theory, and transaction cost economics, to conduct a multi-dimensional comparative evaluation of three supply models for sustainable menstrual products in Chinese secondary schools: market-based individual purchasing, charitable donation, and school–social enterprise collaboration. The literature base includes international organizational policy reports, peer-reviewed journals, and relevant educational statistics.

The study finds that the market-based individual purchasing model fails due to its neglect of liquidity constraints facing secondary school students and heterogeneity in urban-rural household economies; the charitable donation model can alleviate demand in the short term but struggles to establish stable supply chains and long-term operational mechanisms; the school–social enterprise collaboration model can theoretically reduce transaction costs through economies of scale and achieve financial sustainability through commercial revenue, but in the Chinese context it faces unique obstacles including the absence of product standards, ambiguous legal status of social enterprises, and constraints of the public school management system. It is not a ready-made solution for immediate widespread promotion, but rather a long-term exploratory direction requiring institutional preconditions. The theoretical contribution of this paper lies in integrating liquidity constraint theory, externality theory, and transaction cost economics into the analysis of menstrual product supply, constructing an "economic–environmental–institutional" three-dimensional evaluation framework, and systematically identifying the specific institutional barriers facing the social enterprise model in the Chinese context. The practical contribution lies in providing policymakers with a cautious analysis regarding the construction of school-based menstrual health support systems, pointing out that national standard-setting and pilot projects represent more realistic current pathways.