İlayda Eskitaşcioğlu is a human rights lawyer and a PhD student studying international human rights law at Koç University in İstanbul, Turkey. She is a fellow at the UNESCO Chair for Gender Equality and Sustainable Development and a researcher at the Center for Gender Studies (KOÇ-KAM). She founded , an NGO that aims to provide sanitary materials to rural women in Turkey (seasonal agricultural workers, Syrian refugees, and pre-teen) and destroy the stigma around it, in 2016. Along with her team, she is fighting against period poverty and period stigma in Turkey and the Middle East, by providing menstrual products to women and girls from vulnerable communities, and by starting honest and open conversations about menstruation.
She is actively working as a , she is a Stanford AMENDS Fellow and a Global Shaper and her NGO was recently chosen as one of Turkey’s “Changemakers”. Through her gender equality advocacy, in 2019, İlayda became a member of the Beijing+25 Global Youth Task Force, led by UN Women. Besides her activism on period poverty, her academic interests are international human rights law, business and human rights, gender equality, sustainable development, sexual and reproductive rights, and child labour.
