St. Paul startup creates disposable hijab for Muslim health care workers, patients

After spending months working in clinics and hospitals across the U.S. at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Yasmin Samatar and Firaoli Adam had grown tired of having to constantly change their hijabs throughout the day.

As health care workers, Samatar and Adam, both Muslim, are required to wear protective equipment that limits the spread of disease. Unfortunately, existing equipment could not adequately conceal their head coverings, forcing them to change into a new hijab every day, sometimes multiple times a day, during 12-hour shifts.

They conjured the idea to create a disposable hijab while working as traveling respiratory therapists in Boston in 2021, where they noticed one hospital stocked beard covers for male health care workers.

"That's when we looked at each other, and we're like, 'If there's a beard cover, why isn't a hijab cover available?'" said Samatar, a Somali American.

In November, after more than a year of development, they launched Hygienic Hijab through their startup business, Mawadda. The FDA-compliant protective gear is being sampled by 10 hospitals across the country, and the business has secured contracts with hospitals in California, Michigan and Texas — with Illinois and Wisconsin in queue — through distribution partnerships.

In 2022, Samatar and Adam raised more than $10,000 from more than 60 donors in an online crowdfunding campaign to begin manufacturing the protective gear, which is made at a facility on the East Coast.

There are thousands of Muslim women health care workers in the U.S. who wear hijabs, said Samatar. There are hundreds of thousands more Muslim women who are, or will be at some point, a patient in a health care setting.

Not having access to culturally conscious hospital attire, "we felt like we are compromising our safety and comfort," said Adam, who is Oromo American.

Samatar and Adam have heard stories of Muslim women in delivery or surgical rooms being asked to remove their hijabs for sanitation purposes and being given hair nets, which expose their hair and neck.

The two experienced it themselves as students. While being trained in the operating room as undergraduates at St. Catherine University, Samatar was instructed to tuck in her hijab so it didn't come into contact with equipment.

"I was hyper-focused on tucking the hijab in instead of learning the equipment setup," she said. "By the time we walked out of the room, I could not recall anything I learned. I remember being super uncomfortable and feeling like I was impeding my patients' safety and I did not like how that felt."

Afeefa Ahmed, clinical coordinator at Rahma Clinic, a free clinic that serves 1,000 patients a year at the Muslim Community Center in Bloomington, said culturally appropriate scrub caps for Muslim women has been a void in health care settings for far too long. She heard of products similar to the Hygienic Hijab launched in India, but nothing in the U.S.

Calling the invention "phenomenal," Ahmed said "it's a step in the right direction to make Muslim women more comfortable in the workplace."

The founders are selling their product to other businesses as the quickest way to profitability. It can be a difficult process, taking months to become an approved vendor for medical equipment distributors and hospitals. "We knew it wouldn't be easy," Adam said.

But they weren't sure anyone else would solve the problem if they didn't.

"We wanted to stop waiting on things to be done for us, and create things for us, by us," Samatar said.