Luz Cardona, full professor of Organic Chemistry, and Marisa Guillén, professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health at the University of Valencia (UV), coordinate an international cooperation project, ETHIOPIANGIRLS4SCIENCE, aimed at bringing science closer to the women of Ethiopia. As part of this initiative, a comic has just been published that explains menstruation in Amharic (the official language of Ethiopia).
The ETHIOPIANGIRLS4SCIENCE project was born with the aim of promoting interest in science among Ethiopian girls and young people after many years of working in the educational area in Ethiopia and seeing the situation of women in the country. In this sense, taking advantage of the fact that the last cooperation projects of the UV have had the University of Wolaita Sodo as a local partner, “the aim was to promote an interdisciplinary collaboration and educational innovation between the two universities, so that the teachers of the one in Ethiopia coordinate the dissemination of the material between primary schools and institutes using the learning-service methodology. In this way, the three educational levels will be interrelated”, adds Luz Cardona.
Among the actions carried out, translating a game of cards on the formulation of chemical compounds that was developed by an innovation group of the Faculty of Chemistry and edited by the Publications Service of the UV, both funded by the UNESCO Chair, a workshop on menstruation, given by Marisa Guillen as part of a cooperation project funded by the UV in the VI Call for Development Cooperation Projects and the celebration of “Women’s and Girls’ Day in Science” at Sodo Georgis primary school in Wolaita Sodo (Ethiopia), as well as a day where the biological aspects and social and cultural determinants of the menstrual cycle will be analysed and the role of the University of Valencia in its knowledge.
