She had no idea that the 19-year-old had begun exchanging sex for cash in order to help pay for food for her three younger siblings and two cousins, who live together in a one-room house in a waterfront slum community in Mombasa, Kenya. When Bella came home with rice and other ingredients for dinner at the end of the day, she didn’t explain how she had bought them.
“The pandemic broke down the economy, especially for my area. So I had to help in one way or another with expenses,” said Bella over WhatsApp. The teen asked that her name be changed to protect her identity.
Before the pandemic, Bella was a sophomore at a high school in the city, where she was an avid history student and enjoyed playing table tennis with friends during breaks between classes. But in March, as Covid-19 spread, Kenya shut down and so did the schools.
Unable to continue her studies remotely due to a lack of electricity and internet access, and with her mother’s income from selling vegetables on the street slashed, Bella began washing clothes to help supplement the family’s income.
When one of her customers who was much older pressured her for sex, saying he would pay 1,000 Kenyan shillings ($9) or 1,500 shillings ($13) for unprotected sex — triple what he was paying her for doing his laundry — she felt like she couldn’t say no. After he found out she was pregnant, he disappeared.
“The pandemic played the biggest role in me getting this pregnancy right now, because if the pandemic was not here, I would have been in school. Like this washing clothes, and all that stuff, meeting that man, it wouldn’t have happened,” said Bella, who is currently receiving social support and cash transfers through ActionAid, an international campaign group. She supplements this with odd jobs and laundry work.
Now three months pregnant, Bella said she won’t be able to resume her education when Kenya’s schools fully reopen in January — a friend of her mother’s, who had been helping to pay her fees, withdrew her support.
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