Taxing Ethiopian Women for Bleeding

Tax is never neutral. It tells us whose wellbeing is protected and whose dignity is treated as negotiable. Around 500 million women and girls worldwide lack the facilities needed to manage menstruation safely. In too many countries, the products required to bridge that gap are still treated as taxable commodities, folding gender inequality into the architecture of public finance.

Ethiopia’s decision to charge a 15 percent value-added tax (VAT) on menstrual products, a flat levy paid by rich and poor alike and layered on top of import duties, shows exactly where women’s health sits in the hierarchy of fiscal priorities.

VAT is the country’s workhorse tax, collected from households regardless of income. When a system relies this heavily on regressive consumption taxes, those with the least end up paying the most, proportionally, because lower-income households must spend a larger share of what they earn simply to get by. Taxing menstrual products compounds that imbalance.

In reality, the revenue raised from menstrual products is a rounding error. Ethiopia loses far more to practices by corporations and wealthy elites that quietly drain public coffers. Illicit financial flows alone swallow an estimated 10 to 30 percent of government revenue each year. Multinational profit shifting, where companies report profits outside Ethiopia instead of where real economic activity occurs, costs the country more than US$1.1 billion annually.

The contrast matters. Capital faces no such restraint. Investors who expand production can secure full income tax relief and customs duty exemptions. Many sectors enjoy years-long tax holidays, with exporters granted even more. When the state wants to make something affordable for powerful actors, it knows exactly how to do it.

What is spared at the top is recovered in the price of everyday goods. When menstrual products are priced out of reach, only a minority of women and girls can afford to use them consistently. Others are pushed toward rags, newspapers, or ash-filled cloths out of necessity.

This is the price of political convenience: instead of confronting systems that drain billions, the burden is passed onto women and girls.

Taxing the work that keeps society alive

Period poverty is widespread. In Ethiopia, particularly in rural areas, menstruation remains a barrier to school attendance. UNESCO estimates that one in ten girls in sub-Saharan Africa misses school during her period. Over time, losing days of learning each month compounds, narrowing girls’ educational and economic futures.

This is not simply a health or education issue. More broadly, the taxation of menstrual products reveals how social reproduction is treated in Ethiopia. The labour of caring for children, preparing food, supporting elders and sustaining households is essential, yet it is widely assumed to be women’s responsibility alone. This invisible work underpins the entire economy, but it remains largely absent from national economic planning.

Tax policy makes that invisibility concrete. The state under-taxes capital while taxing the goods women need to manage both their households and their own bodies. In periods of conflict, displacement, inflation and rising debt obligations, women are expected to stretch their labour even further, absorbing economic shocks without protection or compensation. When menstrual health is taxed, it reinforces a fiscal logic that treats women’s unpaid labour as an inexhaustible resource, available to subsidise public shortfalls.

What Ethiopia already exempts, and why menstrual products belong there

Ethiopia already makes clear decisions about which goods are too essential to tax. In July 2025, the Addis Ababa Revenue Bureau removed value-added tax on unprocessed vegetables such as onions and potatoes to ease household food bills during a period of high inflation. Officials framed the move as necessary relief for consumers facing rising prices.

Yet menstrual products, which are just as essential, remain fully taxed.

This reflects a wider pattern. Ethiopia relies heavily on value-added tax, a consumption tax paid at the point of purchase, to fund its budget. In 2023–24, VAT collections exceeded 200 billion birr, making it the single largest source of tax revenue. Taxes on income, which rise with earnings, raised roughly half that amount. When a tax system depends more on what people buy than on what they earn, households with the least income end up paying a larger share of their resources in tax, simply because they have little room to save. That dependence is reinforced by generous tax incentives and preferential treatment for large firms, including multinationals, which drain revenue at the top and leave consumption taxes to do the fiscal heavy lifting.

A standard defence of VAT systems holds that exemptions create complexity, and that a uniform rate is more efficient, with revenues later redistributed to offset harm. In theory, that argument rests on the existence of effective public transfer schemes. In practice, no such mechanism exists in Ethiopia to guarantee that women and girls who cannot afford sanitary products will be compensated. Designing and targeting a separate cash transfer programme would be more administratively complex than simply removing VAT at the source.

Even if those practical hurdles were resolved, the case would remain unconvincing. The revenue gained from taxing menstrual products cannot justify the cost imposed on dignity, health and participation. In this case, the efficiency argument collapses under the weight of its own assumptions.

Removing tax from menstrual products would simply extend a principle Ethiopia already applies: when a good is essential to daily life and taxing it harms those with the least, the tax can be lifted. Ethiopia already adjusts its tax system when it recognises that a product matters for public wellbeing. What is missing is the political decision to treat menstrual health in the same way.

Across Africa, countries are moving. Why not Ethiopia?

Rwanda removed VAT on sanitary pads in 2019 and has since supported the expansion of local production to improve affordability and access. Kenya removed VAT on menstrual products in 2004 and, since 2017, has provided free pads to girls in public schools through a national programme. South Africa eliminated VAT on menstrual products in 2019. In each case, governments acted on a simple fiscal principle: essential items should not be taxed as luxuries.

Ethiopia, which often presents itself as a regional leader, is falling behind. It has every opportunity to change course, and the delay has become a form of structural violence, reproduced each month by a tax system that treats women’s needs as expendable. 

The debate is not about affordability. Ethiopia loses far more through tax incentives, exemptions and profit shifting than it ever gains from taxing menstrual products. The real question is why a product so fundamental to dignity and health was treated as taxable in the first place. That question exposes a cruel irony: the very bleeding that makes human life possible is treated as fair ground for financing the state.

Abolishing the period tax will not fix everything, but it would mark a necessary departure from a fiscal system that treats women’s biological necessity as a legitimate source of revenue.

Tax policy is a mirror. What does Ethiopia want to see reflected back?