The plight of Nairobi's sex workers

Her body lay on the cold slab of Nairobi's City Mortuary. Her bulky blonde wig covered part of her face. In life, her body had been battered by alcoholism, drug abuse and violence that sex workers endure. Now in death and without make-up, all the ugly marks of her suffering on her face and hands were exposed for the world to see. A Daily Nation analysis notes that the victim had been booked in by police as 'an unknown African female adult', but her real name was Anita Nyambura. Her body had been retrieved from a city hotel room on 26 March. Nyambura's death came just a few weeks after that of another sex worker, who was killed in Kayole. The woman was picked by a client late at night and her body was later found in a fodder plantation in Ruai. A number of other women have been killed in Pangani, Nairobi West and Lang'ata. No arrests have been made, and police are tight-lipped on the progress of investigations, if any. In 2016 alone, 25 female sex workers were killed in Kenya, according to a report by the Kenya Sex Workers Alliance (Keswa) and Bar Hostess Empowerment and Support Programme. The report was presented to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women in Geneva last year. Anna Kontula, a Finnish MP, recently launched a security application called the Artemis Umbrella aimed at helping sex workers to alert their friends whenever they are in danger or distress. Kontula said the idea of the app came to her mind when she visited Nairobi in 2016 and met sex workers. 'I realised that even though the sex workers were in a tough spot with the legal system and suffered stigma attached to the work and poverty, they all had smart phones, which could be used as security resource,' she told the Global network of Sex Work.