A Social Entrepreneur, Geeta is empowering women to manufacture and distribute reusable sanitary pads to other women and girls living in rural and semi urban areas.

Geeta Solanki is a social entrepreneur and the founder of Unipads India, an organization that manufactures and distributes reusable sanitary pads to underprivileged women in rural India.

According to Geeta, their goal is to improve people's quality of life by producing and supplying reusable sanitary pads on a global scale. At Unipads, they empower women to produce high-quality, reasonably priced, reusable pads that last a year. They choose a select group of women from various villages or semi-urban areas to act as "Kalyani," or change agents, in order to make Unipads accessible in rural and semi-urban areas of India.

Geeta was born and brought up in a small town, Dharawal, in Saurashtra, Gujarat. She did her schooling from Sophia Convent boarding school in Mount Abu. She holds an MBA degree from Gujarat University. She is a childbirth educator too. She has trained more than 600 women in Ahmedabad during their pregnancies.

Geeta says during her pregnancy in 2016, she was diagnosed with a vaginal cyst that required surgery. Due to that, the usual disposable sanitary pads were quite painful to wear, so her mother suggested she use her traditional cloth pads, and to her surprise, they were really comfortable. She did some research and found a few suppliers of reusable cloth pads in India, but they were expensive and only available online. This made them completely unattainable for nearly 90 percent of Indian women. That's when she had the inspiration to create affordable and sustainable sanitary pads for everyone.

Because it is considered so taboo to even talk about menstrual periods in India, initially Geeta was unable to even tell the women she was hiring to make sanitary pads in her village what they were doing. Geeta has employed 135 previously impoverished rural women to manufacture pads for over 800,000 women. She says she helps save thousands of kilos of waste, as the average woman discards 125 to 150 kg of disposable sanitary pads over the course of her lifetime.

Recalling her childhood, Geeta says she is from a small town and comes from a farmer family. But her father, an educated man, understands the value of education and sent her after the seventh grade to a convent boarding school in Mount Abu to pursue a good education before sending her to Birla Public School. She grew up seeing other families in her town who couldn't afford to educate all of their children, so they sacrificed their daughter's education. This discrimination compelled her to consider and work for the welfare of women.

When asked about her role models, Geeta says she considers her ex-employer, Rita Singha, as her role model. She says that during her initial journey, she was associated with the organization ‘Rita's Pregnancy 101’, where she had the opportunity to work under her and learn how to be a childbirth educator. She also considers her father to be an inspiration, and she attributes all her entrepreneurial abilities to him.

In recognition of her accomplishments, Geeta was named Entrepreneur of the Year in the medium business category in the inaugural Vijayalakshmi Entrepreneurship Awards, a project of Satya MicroCapital Limited.

In her spare time, Geeta enjoys traveling with her friends and family. According to her, because she is social, she enjoys interacting with and meeting new people. She enjoys spending time with her family, especially her two daughters.