“The thought that any girl wouldn’t have the potential to flourish, to me, was just unacceptable.”
Meet the unstoppable Amy Peake, the founder of Bath-based charity Loving Humanity, which provides at-cost sanitary product micro-factories to some of the poorest communities in the world.
Loving Humanity’s story begins in 2014, when Amy was working as a personal trainer and Pilates teacher alongside raising her family. Whilst waiting for a doctor’s appointment, Amy was leafing through a magazine. She stumbled across a photograph of 18,000 people queuing for bread in a refugee camp in Damascus. Focusing on a woman in the foreground of the image, it suddenly struck Amy that there must be millions of women and girls in conflict zones and slums without access to sanitary products.
How, she wondered, do they cope?
Amy spent the next seven years travelling to refugee camps across the globe, discovering the need for sanitary products in these communities (not only for menstruation, which prevents millions of girls from attending school, but also for the increasing problem of incontinence), and learning about the various methods that could allow these products to be produced easily on location. To carry out this work, Loving Humanity was founded: a charity project which, with the help of a small community of donors, could begin to restore dignity where it had been ripped away.
In 2016, Loving Humanity opened its first sanitary product factory in Zaatari refugee camp, five miles south of the Syrian border. Working alongside UNHCR and the Norwegian Refugee Council, Amy employed thirty of the most vulnerable women in the camp to run the factory. It was the charity’s first success story.
Momentum built for Loving Humanity after its work was covered by the BBC. After this, Amy can recall receiving hundreds of messages from people all over the globe who wanted the charity’s support.
Today, 27,000 girls a month use Loving Humanity’s pad kits, and there are 78 women across the world in Sierra Leone, Jordan, Burundi and Nairobi who are empowered through working and training at their local sanitary product micro-factories.
At home in Bath, Amy juggles her Loving Humanity work with being the mother of three daughters and studying mediation and conflict resolution. Central to her drive to improve the world is her belief that all people are powerful, and that “if we choose to act, we can be the change we wish to see in the world.”
Amy is now looking to scale up the charity’s work to help other local organisations establish micro-factories of their own and enable thousands more girls to remain in education for as long as possible.
To support Amy’s work, join ‘The Heart’ of Loving Humanity as a monthly donor. Visit lovinghumanity.org.uk
Main photograph by Joe Short, an award-winning photographer based in Bath. joeshort.com