Structural poverty and gender inequality fuel transactional sex among young mothers across Africa: a systemic analysis
Original framing: “Money, food and survival: what drives paid sex among young mums in 3 African countries” — The Conversation - Global
The 1980s IMF structural adjustment programs (SAPs) in Africa dismantled social safety nets, leading to a surge in sex work in countries like Zambia and Ghana—parallels to today’s debt crises. Colonial policies like the Native Lands Act (1913) in South Africa dispossessed Black women of land, pushing them into wage labor and informal economies. Historical records from pre-colonial Igbo society show women’s economic autonomy through trade cooperatives (*ogbo*), a model erased by capitalist individualism.
The original headline reduces a systemic crisis to individual survival tactics, obscuring how neoliberal austerity, colonial land dispossession, and patriarchal healthcare systems converge to produce vulnerability.
In Kenya, IMF-mandated cuts to social spending in the 1990s mirrored SAPs-era policies in Zambia, where sex work surged as women were pushed out of formal economies—yet this transnational pattern is ignored in favor of country-specific 'customization.' Indigenous feminisms (e.g., Oyěwùmí’s critique of colonial gender binaries) and sex worker collectives (e.g., Sisonke) offer alternative frameworks, but their insights are sidelined by donor-driven narratives that frame solutions as technical fixes rather than demands for reparative justice. A holistic response requires debt cancellation, land reform, and the decriminalization of sex work, paired with community-led care economies that restore women’s autonomy. Without addressing the structural violence of global capitalism, interventions will remain Band-Aids on a hemorrhaging system.