Truckers of Shame – Climate-Induced Hunger Fuels Underage Sex Trade Along Southern Africa’s Trade Routes

A darker cloud is befalling underage girls along Southern Africa’s trade routes as the extreme weather crisis fuels desperate survival sex among the region’s youngest and most impoverished rural women.

‘I don’t do it because I want to. It’s hunger,’ Flores Sindi* says to FairPlanet. Sindi is a 17-year-old school dropout in Mudzi on the Zimbabwe-Mozambique northeast border district, where scores of teenage girls like her engage in transactional paid sex with international haulage truck drivers who shuttle lithium for export, mining gear, or commercial supermarket foodstuffs between Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, and South Africa. 

To speak freely, she has changed her surname out of extreme fear of shame and stigma.

Feminisation of poverty

The ‘Feminisation of Poverty’ is underway across Southern Africa as extreme droughts and destructive floods create cycles of food insecurity, which push girls into sex work for survival. Researchers from Zimbabwe’s Midlands State University recently found that already gendered patriarchal norms have left women at a more acute risk of climate-induced hunger and displacement than men. 

‘It’s a growing dilemma – bad weather kills subsistence agriculture. Hunger leaves younger girls with no option but to offer transactional sex for food,’ says regenerative food activist Shamiso Mupara, who says if conventional crops like corn are failing, communities at the mercy of climate disruptions, women must be empowered to plant indigenous food crops and fruit-bearing trees that are tough enough to withstand weather shocks. 

‘If traditional farming fails more, and more young women are pushed into transactional survival sex, this will have big consequences for public health especially for regional countries efforts to suppress new HIV infections,’ Chipo Mala, a hospital matron nurse at Beitbridge Border Post told FairPlanet in November at a community HIV testing and education engagement with the Zimbabwe Aids Council in Beitbridge town. It is the busiest regional land border in Southern Africa, which separates Zimbabwe from South Africa. Mala, who sometimes volunteers with the Zimbabwe National Aids Council to carry out public rapid HIV tests at the border zone, says there has been an ‘influx’ of young women coming to the border to earn a living from transactional sex. ‘The girls tell us one dominant reason – agricultural lands are failing in Zimbabwe’s hinterlands – and due to hunger, they have no option but to come to the border,’ she says. 

This is very disturbing, she says, because the 15-29 age group cohort of young women carries the biggest number of new HIV infections in Zimbabwe, according to UNICEF. 

Drying lands

Mudzi, a land of parched sandy earth, short shrub trees, is one of Zimbabwe’s driest regions, where years of intensifying droughts mean the staple white corn harvests often get hammered along with household stocks of goats or cattle. According to the Zimbabwe National Statistical Agency, the poverty rate here in Mudzi is the highest in Zimbabwe’s northeast region, with 87.7 per cent of families considered poor. For many families in Mudzi, the only viable sources of food are corn oil, wheat, sugar, or rice packets provided by charities like Christian Care, World Vision, among others. 

‘I grew up wanting to be a dentist, but my mum is frail and jobless – and my dad died of HIV when I was 5, and I dropped out of school at 10. My mum knows this,’ Sindi says on why she and a bevy of other teenage girls at the Nyamapanda border post mill around haulage trucks at night doing hookups with drivers for $3 a session. 

‘Sometimes, the drivers exploit our desperation and offer $1 for a night of sex. We must take it because I need to buy food every morning so that my mother can have the strength to drink her anti-HIV meds,’ she says.

It’s a growing crisis that’s repeating itself across all impoverished rural regions of Zimbabwe and neighbouring countries, Tapuwa Nhachi,  a climate and governance expert at Zimbabwe’s Institute of Law and Democracy, told FairPlanet in September during an interview in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. 

As back-to-back droughts decimate subsistence farming models, the international trade routes connecting Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique, and Malawi have become hubs for a desperate, underage sex trade fueled by climate-induced hunger. ‘The age of the girls in this disturbing trade is getting younger, sometimes 14,’ he says.

In the Mudzi district, the rain doesn’t just fail repeatedly. For elderly farmers who used to harvest something – the weather has just changed dramatically in the last two decades, says Gillian Chewa*. Chewa, 60, is a widow who once saw her granaries overflow with maize in the 1980s and 90s. Today, the land is dry patches of grass season after season. With no livestock to fall back on, her granddaughter who is 20, has joined the bevy of girls who are sex workers at the nearby Nyamapanda border that separates Zimbabwe and Mozambique. 

‘I tried to dissuade her, but she is unemployed and told me she wants “something” to feed her one-year-old baby. I fear the haulage truck men will abuse her or infect her with syphilis,’ she told FairPlanet in October, describing how the dozens of young women from her village have decamped to the border post to eke out a living in the thriving sex trade. Chewa changed her surname to protect her family’s dignity. 

Solution  

‘The climate crisis is creating a new HIV time bomb,’ Chipo Mala, the nurse, told FairPlanet. Minimising new HIV along border trade routes is time-critical. 

But directly targeting the poverty-stricken girls most vulnerable to sexual exploitation requires addressing hunger at its root. One solution is increasing sexual health tools, clinics, and nurses at border posts where vulnerable women interact with truckers, she says. For example, expanding access and knowledge about anti-HIV prophylaxis medications is crucial, she says. One newly introduced option is Lenacapavir, an anti-HIV prevention drug that vulnerable women can take to block infection. The rollout of the drug is already prioritising sex worker populations in Zimbabwe, she points out. 

‘We know the girls are hungry and poor and won’t stop offering their bodies to long-distance truck drivers,’ she said. ‘Making them aware of prevention medication like Lenacapavir and making it available in border hotspots will make a huge difference among young sex worker populations,’ she added.