The precarity of mobile loan debt and repayment among female sex workers in Nairobi, Kenya: Implications for sexual health

ABSTRACT

Financial technology tools have been utilised to create readily available mobile loan platforms for urban-based, daily-wage earners in Kenya. From a financial lending perspective, this development signals greater inclusion and equality in formal bank financing systems. In this paper, however, we examine mobile loans and their repayment from the perspective of women who sell sex in Nairobi, drawing upon the qualitative findings of two community-based studies conducted in close collaboration with sex worker-led organisations serving the sexual health needs of their peers. Our findings suggest that mobile loans may undermine the financial security strategies and economic independence of sex workers, leaving these women in more precarious economic circumstances, which have been shown in other instances to have effects on sexual risk taking and vulnerability to HIV infection.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobile loans
• sex work
• Kenya
• sexual health
• precarity
• debt

Introduction

End month isikustress. Keep on going with your M-Shwari limit of Ksh. 6,000. Kumbuka you can lipa mdogo mdogo within 30 days. #GrowNaMshwari. [Let not the end month stress you. Keep on going with your M-Shwari limit of KES 6,000. Remember you can pay it in installments within 30days! #Grow with Mshwari.]

– Unsolicited, cell phone text invitation to M-Shwari loan program

In recent years, a new class of financial technology tools have been utilised to create mobile loan platforms in Kenya (Suri et al., 2021). These loans are readily accessible via internet and, especially, by cell phone. Importantly, they are available to a segment of the population that normally would not be able to borrow from banking and other financial or lending institutions (Johnson, 2016). Recent scholarship in the field of economics and finance emphasise the effect of mobile loans in Kenya in terms of ‘bad debt’ (David, 2018; Wainaina, 2017), that is, unrecovered debt, on the credit sector and in relation to bank gains. This literature also tends to attribute an array of positive effects from the consumer perspective. For instance, in relation to the M-Shwari mobile loan programme, Bharadwaj et al. (2020, p. 2) ‘find high take up of small digital loans among individuals eligible for it, not crowding out … other forms of credit, and also finds that access to this product increases household resilience in the face of negative shocks’. Such perspectives stress the benefits and ease of access of these loans for the ‘average Kenyan’, even though many are daily wage earners and often struggle to accumulate savings that would ensure timely repayment.

Although there is a growing body of literature that discusses the impact of mobile loans on the credit sector, much less has been written about the effects of mobile loan repayment systems and their consequences for ordinary Kenyans. A notable exception, Oduor (2020) discusses the negative impact of mobile loans during the COVID-19 crisis in terms of actual repayment among people working in the Jua Kali (informal) sector – especially among youth who comprise the largest proportion of users (53%). A marked increase in the use of mobile loans during the COVID-19 pandemic shows an increasing reliance on the system, with 43% of Kenyan respondents having used them for the first time (Oduor, 2020). Furthermore, the majority of youth become over-dependent on these loans amid a narrow horizon of employment opportunities. Mobile loan programmes within Kenya, given their high interest rates, have therefore been described as predatory in nature for poorer people and are further characterised as exploitative to daily wage earners (Donovan & Park, 2022). Large cell phone companies in Kenya, such as Safaricom, utilise consumer data to determine loan eligibility and amount limits. These companies use this same technology to collect individual data, which they then share with banks to determine plans for loan repayment, which includes rapidly accruing interest. In this paper, we build upon Donavan and Park’s (2022:, p. 13) critical depiction of mobile loans in Kenya. In particular, we examine the effects of loan repayment on a group of stigmatised women who sell sex and suggest that these loans have come to play a vital role in creating economic conditions that hold important implications for their well-being. We reveal the effect of the evolving usage of financial technology (fintech) among female sex workers on their financial security by drawing upon the findings of two community-based qualitative studies conducted in close collaboration with two community-led organisations in Nairobi known as Bar Hostess Empowerment and Support Program (BHESP) and the Sex Workers Outreach Program Ambassadors (SWOP Ambassadors). It is important to emphasise financial security as a social determinant of health given the relationships between economic independence and security, and the health outcomes of female sex workers (see for example: Mantsios et al., 2018.; Scorgie et al., 2012).

Specifically, our findings suggest that mobile loans may undermine the financial security strategies and economic independence of these women, leaving them in more precarious economic circumstances, which have been shown in other instances to have ripple effects on sexual risk taking and vulnerability to HIV infection (Odek et al., 2009).

Loans programmes, sex work and precarity in the Jua Kali sector

Donavan and Park (2022:, p. 1073) depict mobile loans in Kenya as a late modern neoliberal form of wealth extraction founded on the (faulty) logic that ‘competition and better information sharing will eventually drive down prices’. At the time of their study, in the pre-pandemic era of 2019, it was assumed that the eventual multiplication of these loan opportunities would lead to reduced interest rates (Donovan & Park, 2022). Yet, despite there now being more than 50 mobile loan applications accessible to Kenyans, interest rates have increased in some instances, with some mobile loans sitting at higher lending rates as compared to those offered at banking institutions. For instance, the Bank of Kenya lending rate, at the time of writing, is 12.16%, while the interest rates of Branch International, a mobile loan application, run from 13 to 29%. For those with lower loan interest rates, like M-Shwari, daily ‘excise fees’ (a consumer tax introduced by the National Treasury in 2013) pose an added challenge for poorer Kenyans with respect to personal accounting and loan repayment (Muthiora, 2015).

It is important to note that these loans are readily provided without the careful vetting of the user’s ability to repay, a process that conventionally takes place in banking institutions but is largely absent from mobile loan programmes. While this might appear on the surface as a more democratic distribution of financial resources in terms of providing liquidity of funds to Kenyans normally excluded from institutional lending, our case study of female sex workers suggests a more exploitative system of financing. Donovan and Parks argue that as ‘more and more information is routed through actuarial tables and credit scores, Kenyans find it necessary to comport themselves in a style befitting their accreditation by financiers’ (2022, p. 1071). The insidious nature of these loans is that they are further reinforced through the involvement of the state. The Government of Kenya holds a 51% stake in Safaricom, the country’s most prominent telecom company, which hosts two of the most popularly used mobile loans programmes, M-Shwari and Fuliza. This may help to explain why the Government of Kenya has failed to regulate damaging interest rates while ensuring the persistence of a ‘zero balance economy’, wherein wealth is continually extracted from the poor through a system of debt, further inhibiting daily wage earners from financially advancing themselves:

Safaricom’s ownership is split between private entities and the Government of Kenya. This gives it an intimate engagement with Kenyan regulators who collude in the creation of the digital debt market. In part, this is because the state’s own reproduction depends on the capacity of Safaricom to extract rents from those constrained by the zero balance economy: not only is the state a partial shareholder of the firm, but Safaricom is the single largest taxpayer in the country. (Donovan & Park, 2022, p. 1067)

More recently, in March 2022, the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) has begun tightening regulations having only approved 10 of 288 applications from digital credit providers (DCPs). According to a representative of the CBK, their tight licensing of these credit providers is based on ‘the predatory practices of the unregulated DCPs, and in particular, their high cost, unethical debt collection practices, and the abuse of personal information’ (Mukami Mwangi, 2022).

In Kenya, the Jua Kali sector accounts for 82.7% of employment (World Bank, 2016), and mobiles loans can place these daily wage earners in especial economically precarious situations (Oduor, 2020). Researcher and development specialist Mary Njeri Kinyanjui (2020) powerfully illustrates through her ethnographic case study of ‘Mama Jua Kali’, how a constellation of gendered forms of exploitation and harassment influence the navigations of women in Nairobi’s informal sector. Indeed, female sex workers encounter many of these gendered discriminations in their work. Furthermore, although sex workers are not formally recognised under the labour classification of Jua Kali, their labor operates under many of the same conditions of precarity in terms of uncertain daily earnings and lack of institutional regulations and legal protections, reflecting what anthropologist Clara Han (2018, p. 332) has described as ‘the predicament of those who live at the juncture of unstable … labor and a loss of state provisioning’.

The promotion of mobile banking services and electronic savings programmes among female sex workers in Kenya has been found to positively affect health in terms of vulnerability to sexually transmitted and blood-borne infections (STBBIs) through the reduction of transactional sex (Jones & Gong, 2021). Jones and Gong (2021) found that sexual behaviours among Kenyan sex workers, which normally increase following negative financial ‘shocks’ presented by everyday life, reduced with the introduction of cellphone-based saving programmes. Furthermore, these women were significantly less likely to report symptoms of sexually transmitted infections. However, the growing uptake of mobile loans, which are tied to these same mobile savings accounts, means that repayment at high interest rates jeopardises the ability of daily wage earners to accumulate and hold on to savings. The system of savings through prior banking platforms like M-Pesa have now become closely entangled with a system of debt management through data usage repurposing. Many female sex workers, as we will show, have come to rely upon this system of debt in attempt to pay for everyday expenses and meet immediate needs due to a lack of steady income streams. Their susceptibility to the accumulation of predatory debt can then intensify their vulnerability to HIV and other poor sexual and reproductive health-related outcomes given their need to engage in a higher number of, and indeed riskier, sexual acts to manage their financial precarity (Reed et al., 2010).

Methods

Study setting

Our findings are based on two separate qualitative studies conducted at distinctive time points – i.e. before and after mobile loans became available in Kenya. Our first study, which sought to better understand how the venue-based sex work industry was organised in Nairobi (see Lorway et al., 2018), was conducted between 2011 and 2012, at which time many female sex workers in Nairobi regularly took advantages of the popular cell phone-based savings programme known as M-Pesa, which enabled the ready e-transfer of money between clients and sex workers. At this time, mobile loans were not yet available. Between 2018 and 2019, we conducted our second qualitative study, which aimed to capture the ways that female sex workers in Nairobi confronted forms of economic and structural violence. Many of these participants has not been part of the first study; however, as a group they were similarly representative of women working in the venue-based sex work industry as compared to the first study. During the second study period, most of the women were acutely aware of, or had some direct experience with, mobile loans. It is important to note that the second study occurred before government-imposed, covid-related restrictions. Virtual correspondence with sex worker leaders during the pandemic, following our second study, suggested that women became more increasingly reliant upon mobile loans to make up for major losses in income, as describe elsewhere (Kimani et al., 2020).

Both studies were nested within a larger Kenyan-Canadian public health intervention research collaboration that traces back to the early 1980s (Booth, 2004; Krotz, 2012; Lorway, 2020). Since the onset of this transnational collaboration, female sex worker organisations began to emerge throughout Kenya as HIV prevention programmes matured. Although community organising and dissidence among sex workers in Kenya had been stirring for some time (White, 1990), sex worker advocacy networks only more recently rose to prominence in international health policy arenas. In 2009, the African Sex Workers Alliance (ASWA) was established and was highly influential in asserting its agenda to improve sex workers’ access to health services, and was further strengthened with the formation of the Kenyan Sex Workers’ Alliance (KESWA) in 2010, which pursued legal rights advocacy, as well as health equity goals.

Working under the umbrella of KESWA, the two community-based organisations run by and for sex workers, BHESP and SWOP Ambassadors, directly participated in the design and execution of the qualitative studies. They helped to advise on and devise participant recruitment strategies, conducted qualitative interviews, and helped to decide upon the subject areas and appropriate wording of questions in the interview guides so that the eventual findings would speak to the pressing issues facing their communities. Financial security was one subject area that was re-emphasised by community leaders across both studies as an especially urgent concern that threatened the broader well-being of their peers.

Training and interview guide development

For both studies, after the two sex worker collectives recruited members of their communities to serve as community researchers (CRs), the first and last author began intensive training in qualitative research methods. For the first study, sex worker leaders of the two collectives participated in the design of the procedures and the interview guides, the implementation plan of the project, data collection, and analysis of the findings. Skill building training was woven across the life course of the project. The second study also engaged the community research team (CRT) from BHESP in proposal development. When discussing the study goals, the CRT insisted that it would be useful for them to know and understand how their members were specifically responding to financial struggles. Accordingly, training sessions on how to word qualitative interview guides provided the space for the CRs to tighten the focus of the study around economic strategies of female sex workers in Nairobi.

Data collection and analysis

After the training for each of the two studies, the CRs began to circulate information through their peer networks, via online social network sites. We made attempts during both studies to recruit and interview a group of participants that were representative of the diversity of women selling sex in Nairobi in terms of age, workplace, education level, and relationship status.

In the first study, a total of 36 women completed in-depth qualitative interviews. The women ranged in age from 22 to 43 years and their average age was 28 years. In terms of relationship status, 12% of the women reported that they were in a long-term relationship or married, 22% were separated, and 66% were single/never married. Among the participants, 38% completed primary school, 59% completed secondary school, while only 3% had a university or postsecondary school education.

In the second study a total of 40 sex workers completed interviews ranging in age between 18–40 years of age. Half of these women (n = 20) were relatively older, ranging in age between 30–40 years of age, and had participated in sex work for more than a decade. Most of them (70%) had only completed primary school; while the remaining participants were newer to sex work and younger, ranging in age between 18-26, with a high level of education, most of them (>60%) having completed secondary school or postsecondary education. Most of the older participants (>80%) reported being in a longer-term relationship, were married or separated; while the majority of the younger sex workers (>70%) identified as being single.

The CRT, with technical support provided by the first, second, and last authors, conducted a thematic analysis of the data, which involved manually identifying, analyzing, and drawing out themes for reporting with rich quotations excerpted from the interview transcripts (Basit, 2003). Sorting through and collating similar and divergent quotations enabled us to interpret the emerging patterns and themes. During our analysis, we took an approach of reading and re-reading the transcripts numerous times to identify overarching themes and sub-themes that emerged as the CRT delved deeper into the data. We then grouped these themes under thematic headings, which became analysis categories, and further utilised verbatim quotations to enhance our grasp of the central issues discussed in this paper.

Ethical approval

Ethical approval was obtained from the Health Research Ethics Board at the University of Manitoba, Canada, Kenyatta National Hospital/University of Nairobi Ethics Board, Kenya, and the Ethical Review Committee of AMREF Health Africa in Kenya.

Findings

In this section, we first refer to a portion of the findings generated by the first study (2011-2012) to illustrate the kinds of tactics female sex workers employ to navigate the many potential barriers faced in receiving payment for their labour. These findings emphasise the interrelationships between financial and physical safety during sex work. We specifically focus on women working in venues known as ‘hotspots’, which include nightclubs, restaurants, hotels, and bars with adjoined brothels or sex dens, where 88% of sex work is estimated to take place in Nairobi (Lorway et al., 2018). We briefly discuss how M-Pesa offered strategic value to some sex workers in facilitating their financial security. The second section focuses on the findings from the second study (2018-2019), which illustrates how the uptake of mobile savings and mobile loans programmes have served to create new forms of economic precarity that undermine security strategies sex workers had previously employed with M-Pesa, when mobile loans were unavailable.

Study #1: challenging negotiations and M-Pesa for financial security

Participants were asked about the process of payment during sex work. It was expected that this line of questioning would assist in revealing how sex worker navigated various power relationships at play between sex workers and clients. Although a few participants allowed clients to pay them after sex, most sex workers generally stated that they preferred to be paid before the sex act, specifically due to fears that payment would be withheld. Participants made these decisions based on previous lived experiences with clients wherein trying to obtain payment after sex could often lead to conflict, even to violence. For example, one participant explained her routine of asking for payment beforehand through her previous experience of an assault. ‘I wouldn’t want to go for sex before I get paid, since there [was] a time I went with a client and he beat me up and refused to pay me’. Others rooted their decision to receive money before having sex in the potential that a client might request additional services not agreed upon prior to the encounter, which would give her the opportunity to charge additional money.

Usually, you agree just before you leave the club. You negotiate the price and what services you will give for a certain amount of money, so that if he wants more services he would have to add [to] the amount of money he is giving you. When you get to the room, he gives you your money and then now you can begin to have fun. (Kim, 23 years old)

Others reported sometimes assessing the client beforehand and, if they found them trustworthy, would wait until after sex to ask for payment. Still, these participants understood the risks involved, citing suspicions that certain clients would underpay them if they waited until after to ask for money.

We agree with the client. If I think he is not genuine, I tell him to pay beforehand. Otherwise we may go and then after he is done he just leaves without paying me … There are those who pay well and others who don’t pay well. … Supposing a client pays 1000, or 1500 or 2000 shillings [15 or 20 USD], that is too little. [My good clients] pay up to 5000 shillings. (Jennifer, 26 years old)

Participants explained that waiting until after sex to receive their payment often resulted in conflict when clients confused the purchase of food, drink, and hotel rooms with the cost of sexual service.

But there are some you agree 2000 and they say later 1000 is all they had. Others you agree on 500, they leave you with 300. Others may look [like an] executive to the eyes because of the suits they dress [in], but when you get to bed is when you know their true colours. There is a day I was fucked [by a client] with no pay. He counted all the cost he had incurred on me including the meat we had, transport in a taxi, he took me to [a hotel], the one in town, he told me my room was 3000, 200 taxi and so much stuff. I told him to give me 200 for fare although he had fucked me the whole night. (Maggie, 25 years old)

As the following two participants suggest, such confusion could lead to violence that would result in the loss of income due to recovery time.

Sometimes [clients] are drunk; they don’t pay well, they can beat you because they do not want to pay you, and during payment, maybe they had bought you food or beer maybe credit for your phone and so when it comes to payment they say that they already spent much on you. Others even demand their money back … if you insist on getting paid; they employ physical assault and in the process you may have a black eye, and you may stay at home for a couple of days before you come back. (Tamara, 32 years old)

[Clients] give me what I want to eat or take me to nice places and you feel that you have really met a good guy. But the problem is that you may get a guy who treats you like that and then after sex he refuses to pay you and says, ‘I already bought you things, if it alcohol I bought and you drank it. What more do you want from me?’ … . [I am left] high and dry and there is nothing you can do. (Jess, 24 years old)

Similar to the participant above who insisted that the client and she agree upon the sexual services to be offered so that the client would have to pay for any additional services, some participants insisted that clients give them half of the agreed upon payment as a ‘deposit’ before the sex act and then the remainder after the transaction had been completed.

Okay, I like getting a deposit of half the money we agreed on first before we start the sex, then get the rest of the money when we are done. Some pay me through M-Pesa. (Tanya, 22 years old)

Always we start with the money. We agree on the price and then the client gives me the money or sends it via M-Pesa. They can either give me cash or if it is the whites, they give me dollars; but always we start with the money. (Stephanie, 23 years old)

As many of the participants explained, the use of M-Pesa ensures the reliable transfer of money to sex workers, avoiding direct exchanges of cash, which were considered unsafe, as they risked nonpayment and payment refusal on the part of clients. As the following participant explains, M-Pesa provides additional security as it requires the client’s contact and identity information.

I prefer to get the money before sex. I also accept M-Pesa as long as it is done there and then before sex. And M-Pesa is good because once he sends you the money, there is the identification on that text message so if anything happens, you have his details. (Helen, 27 years old)

For added security, some participants had the client send the money via M-Pesa to a third party, such as a close friend, to avoid the risk of being forced to return the client payment after sex. Mobile banking and savings plans, according to participants, enabled them to avoid carrying cash around while working – a practice that risked theft at the hands of clients, other sex workers, and police. Mobile banking and savings accounts were integral in ensuring financial protection for many of the women interviewed, which was crucial given the complete lack of protection afforded by state authorities who fail to recognise the legitimacy of sex work as labour. Sex workers were also keenly aware that client payment refusals could not be reported to police, and would only risk their own arrest, sexual assault, and bribe extraction.

Study #2: mobile loans and financial precarity

Since the introduction in 2007 of mobile saving programmes in Kenya, banks have made it easier to access banking services for small funds either online or using a short mobile code. This loosely regulated e-credit market has allowed banks to develop independent lending apps that flooded the Kenyan market. During the second study period, many participants reported purchasing multiple SIM cards so as to open multiple bank accounts to simultaneously access various small short-term loans. Participants reported engaging with a number of these financial loaning schemes, all of which are directly tied to their M-Pesa accounts. As they explained, these small loan programmes, which had become increasingly accessible through mobile fintech in the years between the first and second study, were utilised to cope with the unpredictability of income generated from selling sex as well as unexpected life circumstances.

Judie, 26 years old, sharply raised her discomfort regarding mobile loans, citing their aggressive collection tactics:

I don't like that idea but I have heard about them. I just don't like the idea … . Because I might take the loan and fail to pay it back on time, and they will start calling you every now and then requesting you to pay. I just don't like the idea.

Later in the interview, Judie admitted that she had indeed had an upsetting experience when taking out a mobile loan. She said, ‘I took a loan from M-Shwari a long time ago and paid half of it and I was unable to pay the rest of it. From then I had to quit from taking mobile phone loans’. Judie also explained that she, like many other participants, was blacklisted by the credit reference bureau (CRB) when not being able to pay back the small amount (500KES or approximately 5 USD) she borrowed. This meant that she could not access any sort of loans until she repaid the amount, with accruing interest, along with a substantial fine to the CRB.

Despite the readily available nature of mobile loans and the participants’ high level of awareness and use of them, many were unfamiliar with the repayment process and often expressed surprise at the amount and speed at which interest was accrued.

The one thing I had tried last month was Fuliza. I enrolled for Fuliza and requested for 220 but once I received my salary, Fuliza recovered their money and charged me 300. Why is that? Why take 300 while I had requested for only 220? They should have at least taken 250 instead. (Irene, 19 years old)

After borrowing little more than 200 KES (approximately $2 USD), Irene was charged a 25% interest rate. As she also explained, even though she electronically received a payment from her client via M-Pesa, this unexpected deduction of interest left her cash strapped. Furthermore, when a borrower like Irene is unable to pay on time, they are barred from using mobile lending services, revealing the shortcomings of this ‘liberating’ technology for Nairobi’s informal workers. Many of the participants, such as 32-year-old Rashida, reported having outstanding unpaid mobile loans which left them unable to obtain services from other mobile lenders: ‘[T]hey denied me access to more loans. I wanted to enroll for Fuliza but they refused. I have a pending loan on M-Shwari. I am yet to repay it’.

The majority of participants expressed a sense of helplessness, of being trapped by mobile loans schemes, as 29-year-old Maggie says, ‘I have many loans currently, in almost all loan applications and I have not paid since. I have no money at the moment and again their interest rates are high’. Similarly, 39-year-old Shanice expressed feelings of despair in having her credit rating destroyed by taking out mobile loans and being unable to repay them, even after two years. After telling the CR that she was blacklisted, she explained:

I know it will affect me because if I needed a loan now. I will not be approved by any Sacco [registered savings and credit co-operative society]. I'd like to pay, but when I look at the money I earn, it can't allow me to pay for that M-Shwari loan.

As Shanice’s narrative shows, being in default on a mobile loan undermines Kenyan informal workers access to more traditional forms of financial support.

Mary, who was 33 years old when interviewed, struggled to make ends meet. Having ‘bad credit’ was lower down on her list of priorities, as the immediate benefit of mobile loans in terms of survival outweighed her future ability to take out loans. ‘If you pay, you will sleep hungry because of the money that you get’, she explained. Though Mary planned to pay her debt, acknowledging she would not be able to get another loan until she did so, other participants expressed an acceptance of living in a state of perpetual debt. Jennifer, who had taken out various mobile loans, discussed how an unsteady flow of income meant that reliance on loans, and the cyclical repayment and borrowing of loans, was crucial for survival.

[I have loans with] Fuliza, M-Shwari, and Branch. I am yet to repay M-Shwari,

I plan to pay it because it comes in handy to save me when I am broke. I am careful not to request for a loan that is too big for me to repay. The highest amount I borrowed on M-Shwari is 500. I normally borrow 200 shillings. I am yet to repay my current loan of 200, but I know that I have to repay it because of the future. (26 years old)

Having heard the lived experience of other sex workers when using mobile loans, Julie, described her own major reservations in utilising any mobile loan service without financial planning. Her response reflects a conflicted perspective on mobile loans and the cyclical nature of repayment common within the loan process.

I can't take [a loan] because … You have to sort out yourself. Will you be moving from bank to bank taking loans you can't pay? You can't! I'm yet to [take a loan]. If I say I need a loan, maybe if I'm sure it will be of benefit to me if I take it; but not just taking the loan because you're taking it too … . [There is] one that can help me and my children, even when I'm paying I won't feel that itch. You can take a Fuliza loan of 1500 KES without considering what you will go through before paying it back. It would be better to take a huge Fuliza loan because it helps a lot. Sometimes you might consider paying partially and also the money is invested in somewhere else making it possible to repay. You don't just take for the sake of enjoying yourself. (36 years old)

Although aware of the long-term risks of accruing mobile loan debt with late repayment, some participants referenced a specific financial need when explaining why they sought a loan. Sex workers in other cultural contexts have acknowledged the immediate benefits of taking out loans in order to pay their children’s school fees or unexpected medical costs for themselves and their family members (Shekhar, 2023). In cases of dire financial circumstance, loans are a survival tactic that can be acquired quickly, often providing basic necessities such as food. At the same time, as Shekhar (2023) acknowledges with respect to India, they can also lead sex workers into a ‘debt trap’ that makes them vulnerable to forms of exploitation.

Consistently, participants reported that accumulating debt through mobile loan programmes not only threatened long-term financial planning and security but also bore consequences on the immediacy of their financial security during sex work itself. Because debt is tied directly to mobile savings programmes such as M-Pesa, as mentioned earlier, any monetary compensation electronically transferred for sexual services through this platform, would immediately be absorbed and used against the outstanding debt. As 30-year-old Janet explains ‘Sometimes my [cell phone] line is blocked or if I accredit my line with money it gets debited’. Therefore, with the pervasiveness of mobile loan debt among sex workers, women are unlikely to have client payments transferred to their M-Pesa accounts or to other third party peers in order to ensure the safety of their income. Instead, most of the participants had to return to direct cash exchanges, which often left them more financially and physically precarious in relation to nonpayment, theft, and violence, as described in the previous section.

In attempt to avoid rapidly accruing interest and accumulating debt, 27-year-old Eshanti explains how she often borrows money from people she knows to pay the loan back as quickly as possible:

I have a 4,000 shillings’ loan on M-Shwari as we are speaking. I take a loan from people to pay it so that I take money again to pay them because I don't have money to pay it. I will tell you to give me 4 h to pay you back. We survive on soft loans.

Although this strategy enables Eshanti as a daily wage earner to avoid ruining her credit rating, this nevertheless creates an economic scenario in which her daily personal financial management relies not on the accumulation of wealth in the form of savings but on perpetual borrowing from, owing to, and dependence on one’s social network.

Discussion conclusion

Implications for financial autonomy and sexual health

Prior to the launch of mobile loan programmes in Kenya, participant narratives appeared to support the findings of Jones and Gong (2021) on the positive effects of mobile savings programmes like M-Pesa with regard to sex workers’ health and well-being. As we have shown, mobile banking in the form of e-cash transfers between clients and sex workers provide a sense of security and autonomy for these women – both financially and in terms of collecting identifying information on clients for verification and safety purposes, minimising violence that often came with asking for payment after sex. By contrast, when mobile loan schemes became available, although ensuring quick access to needed funds for survival, these loans created a system of cyclical dependence that leads to further financial precarity, undermining women’s financial autonomy.

Buttressed by state interest, these loan programmes are indeed predatory in nature (Park, 2021), often targeting low-income individuals and communities who, as daily wage earners, are rarely in the position to accumulate savings to pay off their debt. This system relies on the vulnerability and inability of immediate repayment to extract wealth from the poor (Donovan & Park, 2022). Mired in mobile loan debt, lacking sound financial status as daily wage earners, positioned our participants as the ideal customers for these loans, given their likelihood of returning to the service out of continued necessity and their precarious daily financial circumstances. This re-engagement with the debt economy is reflected in how many participants owned multiple SIM cards in order to access various mobile loan programmes simultaneously, continually shifting around currency toward debt repayment to make ends meet. Debt, repayment, and re-borrowing therefore becomes the normalised economic strategy for this disenfranchised group, as large companies like Safaricom profit off a form of economic subjugation that often ends in bad credit ratings and suspended cell phone services – resources that are essential for the livelihoods of sex workers (see for example: Panchanadeswaran et al., 2017).

More disturbingly, the rise of this debt economy in Kenya has been accompanied by the emergence of aggressive private debt collection agencies that in some cases send collectors to seize valuable material goods from debtors in lieu of repayment. Calling the police when these unregulated private repossession companies attempt to recuperate loan debts through home visits and other intrusive and violent means is not possible as this generates its own set of problems. Kenyan police, who are extremely low paid, survive on their own system of regular bribe extractions (Onyango, 2022).

Predatory lending is certainly not peculiar to Kenya. In South Africa, the emergence of a constitutional democracy in 1994 brought with it sudden access to multiple forms of credit for dispossessed populations who had been previously denied (James, 2014; James, 2021). Yet, for those from marginalised or vulnerable communities, especially those separated along lines of race and class, limited access to formal borrowing also resulted in the creation of informal, and indeed predatory, neighbourhood money lenders whose monthly interest rates can reach as high as 50% (James, 2014). This postcolonial ‘credit apartheid’ creates complex relationships between lender and borrower, with many borrowers in the informal sector describing their experiences of debt entrapment as similar to the ‘perpetual enslavement’ experienced by past generations during the colonial period (James, 2014). In Vietnam, borrower–lender relationships for sex workers excluded from participating in mainstream financial lending have also been described as a form of modern slavery, where debts amalgamated by sex workers through exploitation by money lenders creates a form of vertical bondage (Lainez, 2018; also Shekhar, 2023 discussion of debt among India sex workers). As in South Africa, economic reforms in Vietnam that have encouraged people to borrow and consume exclude a critical consideration of marginalised groups. Women who engage in sex work, such as those in our study, then, engage in more ‘risky’ lending practices in the pursuit of survival and economic freedom (James, 2021; Lainez, 2018).

It should be noted that these ‘borrowers on the margins’ do indeed view informal or predatory lending as a means to exercise one’s inalienable right to take out loans where they were previously denied (James, 2021; Lainez, 2018). Participation within these credit apartheid systems, however predatory in actuality, is presented as a means of emancipation out of poverty, and so are voluntarily engaged with as a means of exercising agency and capacity to negotiate. These ‘perilous but indispensable’ debt arrangements, while presented as a choice to consumers, share certain qualities with the outcomes shared by our study participants, by generating dependence and bondage (Lainez, 2018; Shekhar, 2023). Commonalties of predatory loan practices include distinct targeting of low-income individuals, women, immigrants, the elderly, people experiencing houselessness, and people experiencing food insecurity (Johnson, 2010; Nier, 2007; Taylor et al., 2004). For these groups, systems of predatory lending are caught up within the much larger landscape of predatory capitalism, where debt, the effects of debt, and the perpetual pursuit to join the middle class and beyond, exists by design (Collins et al., 2008).

With respect to sexual health programmes among female sex workers, given the current emphasis placed on structural interventions to mitigate the wider social, political, and economic forces that create sex workers’ vulnerability to STBBIs, including HIV, and inhibit their access to sexual health services (see for example: Blankenship et al., 2006; Musyoki et al., 2021; Reza-Paul et al., 2012), our findings raise important questions that require further research to better understand the relationship between entanglement in the mobile loans debt economy and STBBI/HIV vulnerability. We do however know that Kenyan sex workers ‘increase their supply of unprotected sex when coping with unexpected income shocks’ (Jakubowski et al., 2016, p. e22; also see Robinson & Yeh, 2011). In the case of our study, returning to cash-based exchanges during sex work places sex workers at a greater risk of client violence and reduced or nonpayment of services because of the inevitability of conflicts that emerge around payment for sex. This parallels the findings of Okal et al. (2011, p. 614) that show how ‘arguments over payment often triggered conflict, including threats, intimidation and violence’. For these reasons, we insist that it is important for public health researchers and practitioners concerned with the sexual health and well-being of female sex workers to consider how loan predation may both reinforce and feed off the financial precarity of sex workers, thereby undermining intervention efforts that strive to confront the wider structural-environmental conditions of vulnerability that produce poor health outcomes among these women.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Manitoba [grant number #47127].