Sex work as a livelihood and poverty alleviation strategy

January 16, 2021

 

 

 

 

Sex work or generally referred to as prostitution has been of late embraced by women and girls as a poverty reduction strategy during covid 19, a pandemic which has ghastly depleted livelihoods and widened the poverty gap. Albeit the transmission risk factor attached to engaging in such a bodily activity, sex workers are left with no alternative  or risk starving themselves and their families. Sex work is the most stigmatized and frowned upon  informal profession in the world as much as the sex workers themselves are the most discriminated population in the communities they live, who have to contend with seclusion, physical, sexual abuse and exclusion from most public commodities and developmental agendas. Despite all these negatives, sex work is usually driven by poverty, lack of empowerment and unemployment. Even at a time when sex work is criminalized in the country, there is unabated hive of activity at touch lines where sex workers as young as 14 plie their trade just so to earn enough to buy the next meal as the earnings derived from the work is hardly enough to sustain anything outside a basic meal and mediocre accommodation. Most lenses are drawn on highlighting the dangers associated with the trade rather than evaluation how women and girls enter this profession as a livelihood and poverty reduction strategy which sp  urs the need to program poverty alleviation and food security during disaster times so as to protect our women and girls. We managed to interview *Rutendo , a sex worker who was driven into sex work by poverty and having no education at all, it was either that or she succumbs together with all here dependents. She expressed her gratitude to ROOTS for giving her the much needed relief of a food pack as she had no one else to turn to.