Trisha Mukherjee is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School, human rights journalist, and 2024 winner of NY Times journalist Nicholas Kristof’s win-a-trip contest. In 2024, she traveled with Kristof to Kenya, Madagascar, and Mauritius. She authored “The Shame That Keeps Millions of Girls Out of School”, highlighting the issue of period poverty and the barriers this poses to girls’ education. GCE-US Senior Fellow Kate Mallory interviewed Trisha about her trip and her work in human rights journalism. 

You can keep up with Trisha’s work through her website and her Instagram. 

To start, what was your experience like on your trip? Was there anything about journalism or human rights that you didn't know  about before your trip?

To start off, it was an amazing trip. As a young journalist who is really interested in writing about women's rights, global health, and access to education, I can't imagine a better way to start off my career than traveling with Nick. We spent several days in Kenya, mostly in Nairobi. Then, we spent several days in Madagascar. And in Madagascar, we split our time between Antananarivo, which is the capital city, and then several of the villages in southern Madagascar. Southern Madagascar is one of the poorer parts of the country. I think going there with Nick was a really amazing experience. It's something that I might not have done on my own. 

We interviewed people who were really facing the brunt of our changing planet. There are some people we spoke to who had nothing but cactus fruit to eat for weeks. A lot of that was as a result of climate change, much of which is caused by the emissions from the US and other Western countries. It was an interesting dynamic because some of the people we interviewed didn't know what the United States was – they had never heard of it. So, to see how interconnected the world is, from where I'm sitting right now in New York City to that small village in Southern Madagascar, just emphasized the importance of telling these global stories to me. 

We were in Mauritius for about a day. I hope to go back to all three of those places. I was really grateful to talk to a lot of women, young mothers, young children about things like education, how important that was for them, and also how hard it was for them to access it in a way that we, in the US, might never think about.

How does period poverty and other forms of poverty that you just described impact access to education? What are some of the barriers you observed there?

With most of the girls that I spoke with in Kenya and Madagascar, especially in more rural areas, but even in some urban areas, menstrual products were essential to their education. There might be a great school setup, and there might be great teachers. But for these girls, if they had to go to school and they were scared that blood from their period would leak through their clothes, that was a source of such intense shame for them that they would rather not go to school at all.

If you are missing this one instrumental piece of the puzzle, that prevents a girl from getting an education. And so I interviewed many girls about that. Some girls just didn't go to school for about a week every month because they didn't have period products. Some girls would use rags that they would wash many times. There were instances where girls would share rags and that would contribute to the spread of Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) and other diseases. There were some girls whose moms would buy disposable pads from the nearest city maybe once every few months when they could afford it. Then, girls would wash those pads and use them over and over again. But of course, you can't reuse a single-use disposable pad that you've already used for months on end. So overall, there were just so many obstacles that stemmed from just such a basic natural thing that half of the world's population goes through all the time. It seemed like such a shame that so many of these bright young girls who had really, really big dreams were prevented from accessing education because of their periods. 

What are some solutions you witnessed that communities, NGOs, and others were  taking to remedy this issue and give girls  the most support that they could?

I think that one of the most basic solutions is just providing those pads. There's a lot of work to be done in that realm, and there's also different ways to go about it. Some places want to provide free disposable pads for all the girls who attend their school. For example, in the principal's office, there could be a bin full of disposable pads, where a girl can go in and just pick one up for free when she wants. Stocking them in the girls bathroom could also help. Those are strategies that we've also adopted in the US. 

And then another side, which I think is less explored, is thinking about how we add interventions that will help girls go to school even once they have the pads. Those are things that we think less about. For example, having a specific girls' bathroom versus a boys' bathroom can make a huge difference. Some of the girls I interviewed  said that they don't want a boy to hear them unwrapping a pad and hearing the crinkling of the plastic because that's something that's shameful. Just having a different bathroom can do a lot.

I think there's a lot of other interventions that can be combined with distributing pads that we should explore and integrate into our work. I think one of the most important things that should be emphasized over and over and over again is that it's not a shameful thing to have a period. In fact, it's a wonderful thing. I think having conversations about periods with both girls and boys and adults and teachers, just emphasizing that this is something that is normal. We should have infrastructure to destigmatize it and help girls come to school, whether they're on their periods or not. So all of those things in combination, I think, can really revolutionize girls' education in vast parts of the world.

We're interested to know what kind of stories you're interested in writing. Do you plan on writing more humanitarian-oriented ones? Are there certain topics you want to discuss or places that you want to go? Basically, what do you see as your next steps?

I definitely want to keep working on global human rights. I was already hoping to do that because Nick has been a role model to me since I was little, and I always wanted to do similar work to what he does. I hope to keep going down that path of focusing on human rights, education, health care, immigration, climate, how all of those weave together. That's the crux of my work.

In terms of places, I'm really interested in Latin America, Africa, and South Asia. Our lives in the US are so interconnected with the lives of people in these places that we often perceive as so far away. A big example of that right now is the USAID funding cuts. USAID funding cuts are taking away a lot of these forms of humanitarian aid for so many people around the world, and it's really devastating. Beyond that, I hope to be a foreign correspondent and continue bringing these issues to global attention.

What advice would you give to journalists who want to go on trips like you did or who want to report on humanitarian news like you do?

Start doing your own thing! This industry is changing a lot, and it's hard to find opportunities that are handed to you and set up for you. So, just start working on your own. When I was in high school, inspired by Nick, I became really curious about human trafficking and what the solutions are to this big global problem. I reached out to a bunch of activists who were working on finding solutions to human trafficking and then interviewed them. I wrote those interviews up into a short self-published book. That was the beginning of my career in the sense that I realized I really loved doing this and I wanted to continue. Talking about that project helped me in the future. I had no credibility to my name; I was just a high school student. I emailed people and I was like, "I admire your work so much, I'd really love to learn about it. Do you have half an hour to talk with me?". People were happy to share, so I kept doing that.

After college, I did a similar thing where I made my own podcast. It was completely independent and I interviewed activists all around the world from India to Kenya to Singapore. I think that work again did that two-sided job of convincing me that this is the path that I really want to go down. This also showed other people who I worked with in the future that I was really determined and I was really passionate about this work. That ended up getting me some of my future jobs and it just snowballed from there.