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On 26th August 2013, Kenya’s Citizen Television aired an emotive feature titled “Period of Shame”. Janet was a News Anchor and Reporter on the station at the time.

The feature highlighted the plight of primary school girls in Labos Primary School, Marigat District, Baringo County, Kenya who, with no access to sanitary towels, resulted to using rags and chicken feathers during their monthly period.
Viewer reaction was immediate and soon it became clear that something needed to be done to ensure that our girls were not missing classes due to lack of sanitary towels.

As a result, Janet was motivated to set up Inua Dada initiative, which she later registered as a Foundation, to address this issue.

The public contributed generously towards Inua Dada initiative campaign effort and on 7th November 2013 the First Lady of Kenya Her Excellency Margaret Kenyatta successfully launched the Inua Dada Sanitary Towel distribution drive at Labos Primary School. In the years that followed, Inua Dada co-convened the 2014 Day of the Girl event with the Ministry of Education, collaborated on an Op-Ed on the same day, with UNICEF Kenya, carried out dignity kit distributions in Nairobi, Eldoret and Baringo and held community engagements and school talks from 2015 to date. The foundation also released its advocacy tool when founder Janet Mbugua authored ‘My First Time’, which was announced to the public in 2020.

#Better4Kenya is a campaign that seeks to amplify public discourse and put pressure on the Government to prioritize gender equality. We bring together credible, diverse influencers i.e.:, Media Personality and Podcaster Adelle Onyango, TV and Radio Presenter Amina Abdi, Hip Hop Artist and Entrepreneur King Kaka and TV Host and Content Creator Sharon ‘This Is Ess’ Mundia among others, to lead a unified and positive conversation about gender equality to help those organizations already fighting for gender equality to build a broader base of support for change.

Janet Mbugua is the project lead in this campaign, which is done collaboratively with The Hive and we believe that when women and men have equal rights everyone wins. It is #Better4Kenya. Better family income, healthier, better educated children, richer local communities and an enhanced national economy.

While some progress has been made on gender equality, laws have not always translated to lives; things are simply not changing fast enough.