From MPP to Gender Health Equity Entrepreneur

Ira Guha MPP 2019 knows all too well that millions of girls and women face ‘period poverty,’ meaning safe and affordable menstrual products are not accessible to them. Guha grew up in Karnataka, a state in southern India where some women regularly miss out on school, work, and community life, simply because they have their period.

“People are spending five days a month sitting at home rather than living life to their full potential,” she said.

“My period made going to work so stressful,” said Maheshwari, an artisan at a textile factory in Mysore, Karnataka, who used to experience period poverty. “I was always worrying about leaks and going to the bathroom to change pads.”

“Constantly worried about stains ruining my clothes, I’d rarely venture out of home,” another woman, in the Karnataka village of Kadahalli, said.

Sonika, a college student in Kanakapura, Karnataka, put it simply: “I dreaded my periods.”

When she was a student at the Kennedy School, Guha began working to address this problem. She partnered with an engineer and user testers to design and patent an easy-to-use menstrual cup, then founded Asan, a social enterprise aiming to get the cup to low-income women in rural areas of India like Karnataka.

Her work has been highly successful – since its founding in 2021, Asan has distributed the cups to 150,000 underserved women and counting.

“This cup has changed my life,” said Maheshwari, the Mysore textile artisan. “Now I can comfortably and freely travel, work, and be active.”

“Periods become less of a big deal now,” Guha said, “and that equalizes the playing field for women and girls.”

Her success story with Asan, Guha said, is one that only could have begun here at Harvard. The school provided her with course teachings, funding opportunities for student innovation and experiential learning, and connections with everyone from manufacturing developers to financial backers – not to mention “that Harvard spirit.”

“I was always very aware of the problem,” Guha said. “But what HKS and Harvard gave me were the tools and the inspiration to actually do something about it.”

She originally conceived Asan as a project for an entrepreneurial finance course taught by HKS adjunct lecturer and athenahealth cofounder Carl Byers MC/MPA 2012. He encouraged her to take the next steps to turn her idea into a reality, and in the summer of 2019, the Women and Public Policy Program funded her through the Lara Warner fellowship to create the first Asan cup at the Harvard Innovation Lab.

From there, Guha began working with product testing groups in the US, the UK, and India. She used their feedback to iterate on the prototype “until it was perfect.”

There was no point in creating a product that women wouldn’t use, so this phase was crucial. Asan means ‘easy,’ Guha said, because she wanted the product to be the easiest-possible period cup to use. So she trusted her user testers, and ignored bias from those who said rural Indian women would never use an insertable period product.

As it turned out, there was an extremely high adoption rate of 90 percent when they began distributing the cup in rural areas of Karnataka, in large part because alternatives were basically non-existent. Plastic pads are expensive, require travel to purchase, and need to be burned for disposal, while rags use a great deal of time and water to clean.

“These women are very resourceful,” Guha said. “Putting a tiny cup into a cup of water for two minutes to rinse it, compared to scrubbing rags for hours? Of course they’re going to do it.”

To raise awareness of the product and encourage its use, Guha and her team used a peer influencer model, where local community leaders were taught to use and then promote the Asan cup. When this was highly successful in Karnataka, the organization began expanding, partnering locally in each community.

Then came the next challenge – getting Asan to be a sustainable, self-financing business model.

Guha had started the organization with a goal of empowering underserved women and girls, but these same people couldn’t afford to buy her product. To be able to give the cup to these women, she needed higher-income individuals to pay full price, and she needed large-scale orders for Asan cups by organizations rather than individuals.

Targeting these different organizations and demographics requires a variety of tactics, Guha said.

“You have to be really strategic,” she said. “It’s important to know your audience.”

Sometimes – like if a company employs hundreds of low-income women and wants them to be able to come to work while menstruating – the ‘business case’ is the most compelling argument.

“Sometimes I do have to say, in the past year, we missed out on 100 billion dollars of GDP because women are out of the labor force [for five days every month],” Guha said.

With other audiences, it’s more effective to share her lived experience as a woman who deeply understands the need for her product.

In every case, Guha has found, “if you talk to people like a human, you’ll find what resonates to make people care.”

This lesson has served her well in her journey from MPP to leader of an ever-growing impact organization.

Asan reached 60,000 additional women in 2025, with more than 75 percent of its units going to underserved women. Distributing the reusable cups has also averted over 200 million plastic pads from landfills in the years since the organization was founded.

Asan continues to expand, most recently into five East African countries, and see high levels of adoption in every community. The organization’s goal is to end period poverty by 2030, Guha said, but added that this goal has other meaning too.

“It’s not just about period poverty,” she said. “It’s about women’s economic empowerment, women’s participation in daily life.”

Reflecting on how she has built and grown this gender equity-focused organization even as women’s rights have taken hits around the world, Guha credited several factors from her time at HKS. She learned hard skills like finance and honed soft skills like adaptability and resilience while she was an MPP, and she also took advantage of the community – from professors to peers to Boston-area alumni.

“There are so many opportunities here at Harvard to build connections,” she said, adding that she has relied on help from others to get Asan where it is today.

“In the age we live in, it’s all about building alliances rather than being siloed,” Guha said.

For other social entrepreneurs, she’d advise them, “you have to invite people in. Try and build a broad coalition… because you need everyone’s support to make progress.”

Learn more about the Asan cup, and some of the women quoted in this article who have benefited from its use, on YouTube.