Transactional sex amongst young people in rural northern Tanzania: an ethnography of young women's motivations and negotiation

An ethnographic research design was used, with information collected primarily using participant observation and in-depth interviews in a rural community in North Western Tanzania. The qualitative approach was complemented by an innovative assisted self-completion questionnaire.Transactional sex underlay most non-marital relationships and was not, per se, perceived as immoral. However, women's motivations varied, for instance: escaping intense poverty, seeking beauty products or accumulating business capital. There was also strong pressure from peers to engage in transactional sex, in particular to consume like others and avoid ridicule for inadequate remuneration.Macro-level factors shaping transactional sex (e.g. economic, kinship and normative factors) overwhelmingly benefited men, but at a micro-level there were different dimensions of power, stemming from individual attributes and immediate circumstances, some of which benefited women. Young women actively used their sexuality as an economic resource, often entering into relationships primarily for economic gain.Transactional sex is likely to increase the risk of HIV by providing a dynamic for partner change, making more affluent, higher risk men more desirable, and creating further barriers to condom use. Behavioural interventions should directly address how embedded transactional sex is in sexual culture.The exchange of sex for money or gifts in sub-Saharan Africa has been widely reported. It is generally interpreted as a consequence of women's poverty and economic dependence on men (e.g [1-6]). Many have noted that impoverishment deters women from negotiating safer sex [7-10] and makes younger women vulnerable to the enticements of older men or 'sugar-daddies' [3,9-12].However, several detailed studies have suggested that material exchange for sex (or 'transactional sex') is not always engaged in through immediate material need. Many Senegalese prostitutes in the Gambia were reported to be from non-impoveris