![]() And in 2017 they came up with a strategy to grow their business. These women pool the money they've saved from their earnings to cover repairs on their vessels and to purchase new nets. "Some women are more engaged and successful than others," Higdon reports.īut he's encouraged by the results, especially among boat owners who formed a cooperative - the No Sex For Fish Women's Group. They no longer had to consider transactional sex as a way to negotiate for fish to sell or to pay off a debt. When the women had their own boats, "that really flipped the economic dynamic," Higdon says. The women came up with an idea: "a project that would allow them to construct their own boats," says Higdon of World Connect, which offered grants to cover the cost. That way, instead of depending on fishermen and their boats, they could hire men to fish for them, then sell the fish the men bring back to earn a living. The women came up with a plan that would enable them to stop offering sex to keep their business going. In other communities where sex for fish occurs, nonprofit groups and entrepreneurs are working on ways to curtail the practice.Ībout seven years ago, representatives of World Connect met with a group of 30 or so women who are fish traders along Nyamware beach on Kenya's Lake Victoria, about six miles south of the port city of Kisumu. Overall, Gunther says she came away from her month in Malawi with a sense of women in despair - and little hope for change. She says she earns significantly less than she did before.Īnother woman who gave up the practice is Catherine Kambanje, who now burns wood to make charcoal, which she sells. Now she burns wood to make charcoal, which she sells. ![]() She'd use some to feed her family and sell the rest. She says she traded sex for fish for seven years. Gunther did meet several women who had moved on from selling fish.Ĭatherine Kambanje with her 1-year-old son, photographed in the village of Kachulu on Lake Chilwa in Malawi. Others try to sell fish to support a large family. They are simply women in tough circumstances, trying to eke out a living. They do not consider themselves sex workers. The women told Gunther they are embarrassed by what they do to survive financially. He was threatening me that if I take the net, I am going to beat you." "I gave money to a certain fisherman, and he did not give me my fish. And "sometimes the fishermen are violent to me," she says. ![]() At one point, "some fishermen took my money and ran away," she says. Her comments also reveal the precarious life faced by female fish sellers. "The fishermen will say, keep the profit and I come to your house in the night. The 39-year-old woman told Gunther that even when she makes a profit on the fish, sex can enter into the equation. Most of the women asked that their names not be used because of the fear they will face discrimination in their communities. Partnering with videographer Nick Schonfeld, Gunther spent nearly a month in several villages in Malawi in 2018 to document the practice of sex for fish. She was one of 19 women interviewed about the practice by the German photojournalist Julia Gunther, whose images are featured with this story. "The fishermen want to mostly have unprotected sex," says a 39-year-old woman in Chisamba Village, Malawi, who sells fish and sometimes engages in transactional sex. "The more mobile they are, the more they endanger the health of others." If they have the virus, they can bring it into a community, or if they become infected in the course of their travels "they will transmit," Banda says. The fishermen travel to different fishing spots along the lakefront and then bring their catch to the local community fishmonger, says Alfred Banda, an outreach worker with Youth Net Counseling in Malawi's Zomba district. In Malawi, approximately 1 in 10 adults ages 15 to 64 is HIV-positive, according to UNAIDS - one of the highest rates in the world. ![]() Kachikho and others in Malawi and Kenya believe that fish for sex is a contributor to the spread of HIV in a part of the world where the rate of HIV is high. "Poverty is the main reason for fish for sex," Kachikho says. Once it was plentiful, but now it is listed as "critically endangered" because of overfishing.īut it is clear why it happens. Chambo is one of Malawi's most popular fish. A fisherman holds up a chambo - what locals call a type of tilapia native to Lake Malawi.
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