‘I started campaigning before I could even vote!’ Amika George on period poverty, politics and the power of protest

At just 17, the schoolgirl began a campaign to ensure every school offered free sanitary products. Now 22, she talks about tackling stigma, her new book and her fears about the UK’s new police bill

A mika George, 22, didn’t set out to be an activist. “None of my immediate family were involved in formal politics in any way,” she says. And yet, while still a teenager, she ran the successful Free Periods campaign that led to free sanitary products being placed in schools and now she has a book, Make It Happen, about how to get involved in politics from the grassroots.

Featuring prominent voices from Arundhati Roy to the Egyptian writer and radical Wael Ghomin, its worldview is that there is an infinite possibility for change, situated in the hands of every one of us. In other words, it is a remix of Hannah Arendt with a sunnier chorus. So I am surprised when I speak to her, not just by her hinterland but by her manner. I was expecting a punchy, studs-first Marxist; instead I find a quietly spoken, very thoughtful committed Christian, who is constantly challenging, often playful but always with serious intent.

George was just 17 when she read a headline on the BBC website: “Girls Too Poor to Buy Sanitary Products Missing School”. She had read an article about period poverty in India, and what now caught her eye was that one charity was diverting products that it had intended to send to Kenya to the UK. Students in the UK, it seemed, were facing the same problems as those in the developing world. That was 14 March, 2017; by April, she had set up Free Periods, to campaign against period poverty. She promoted her cause diligently: from the obvious (a petition on change.org) to the festive (a demonstration in Parliament Square just before Christmas, 2018. “Even though everyone was protesting period poverty – something so horrendous – it was also a celebration of periods”, she says).

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