By Nyasha Kadandara
Published August 30, 2018
More and more young women in Kenya are using sugar daddies to fund a lifestyle worth posting on social media.
A 19-year-old student at Nairobi Aviation College, was sitting in her tiny room in shared quarters in Kitengela feeling broke, hungry, and desperate. She used the remaining 100 Kenyan shillings she had in her wallet and took a bus to the city centre, where she looked for the first man who would pay to have sex with her. After 10 minutes in a dingy alley, Eva went back to Kitengela with 1,000 Kenyan shillings to feed herself for the rest of the month.
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Six years ago, when she was at university, another girl we shall call Shiro met a married man nearly 40 years her senior. At first, she received just groceries. Then it was trips to the salon. Two years into their relationship, the man moved her into a new apartment because he wanted her to be more comfortable. Another two years down the line, he gave Shiro a plot of land in Nyeri county as a show of commitment. In exchange, he gets to sleep with Shiro whenever he feels like it.
Eva’s experience is transactional sex in its most unvarnished form – a hurried one-off encounter, driven by desperation. Shiro’s story illustrates an altogether more complex phenomenon – the exchange of youth and beauty for long-term financial gain, motivated not by hunger but by aspiration, glamorised by social media stars, and often wrapped in the trappings of a relationship.
In Kenya, “sugar” relationships seem to have become both more common and more visible: what once was hidden is now out in the open – on campuses, in bars, and all over Instagram.
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Exactly when this happened is hard to say. It could’ve been in 2003 when Kim Kardashian’s infamous sex tape was leaked, or a little later when Facebook and Instagram took over the world, or perhaps when 3G internet hit Africa’s mobile phones.
But somehow, we have arrived at a point where having a “sponsor” or a “blesser” – the terms that millennials usually apply to their benefactors – has for many young people become an accepted, and even a glamorous lifestyle choice.
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You only have to visit the student districts of Nairobi, one recent graduate told the BBC, to see how pervasive the sponsor culture has become. “On a Friday night just go sit outside Box House [student hostel] and the see what kind of cars drive by – drivers of ministers, and politicians sent to pick up young girls,” says Silas Nyanchwani, who studied at the University of Nairobi.
Until recently there was no data to indicate how many young Kenyan women are involved in sugar relationships. But this year the Busara Centre for Behavioural Economics conducted a study for BBC Africa in which they questioned 252 female university students between the ages of 18 and 24. They found that approximately 20% of the young women who participated in the research has or has had a “sponsor.”
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If one end of the sugar spectrum features young women with their sights set on a hot pink Range Rover, a luxury condo and first-class tickets to Dubai, at the other are women angling for little more than some mobile phone credit and maybe a lunch at Java coffee house.
But the gulf between them may not be so deep as it seems.
A BBC Africa Eye article