When an NPR team met Justine Adhiambo Obura in the fall of 2019, she wore a turquoise t-shirt with a bold message: “No Sex for Fish.”
It wasn’t just an eye-catching slogan. It was a summation of the indignities women faced in her world — and how they flipped the power dynamic.
In a number of lakeside communities in Africa and other parts of the world, men do the fishing and women sell the fish. For many of the women, living in poverty and with minimal education and a lack of job opportunities, there was no other way to earn a living, to support their children.
As supplies of fish diminished in various locations, fishermen began demanding sex in exchange for providing a woman with fish to sell. That was the case in Nduru Beach on Lake Victoria, where Obura lives. A lot of the fishermen were HIV positive and infected the women. The women hated this practice of transactional sex but many felt they had no choice. “I exchange sex; I get fish,”
Mika Onyango, a mother of six, told us. “I don’t care about getting HIV. Me, I need fish. I need earning to sustain my family.”
In 2011 Obura and others came up with a game-changing idea. What if they owned their own boats – and hired men to fish for them? With the help of a couple of Peace Corps volunteers and a series of grants, they started the No Sex for Fish cooperative. Eventually, Nduru Beach and eight other area villages got boats – around 30 in total. The women of Nduru Beach not only earned a living but built up a sizeable rainy day fund – some $6,000 – which they donated or loaned to members facing financial stress.
Then came an unprecedented series of rainy days. In early 2020, Lake Victoria rose and flooded Nduru Beach. The 1,000 or so residents fled to safety. They abandoned their homes; many of them had no alternative but to live in improvised shelters at local schools. They had no personal savings – and for the women of No Sex for Fish, no way to make money. These women – some of them single mothers, some of them HIV positive – saw most of their boats lost or damaged beyond repair. The money the group had saved over the years enabled them to weather these dire times.
Some former fishmongers turned to farming. In nearby Kusa Beach, which had a chapter of No Sex for Fish, a tomato project looks promising. Obura and some of the women of Nduru Beach tried agriculture too. It didn’t work out for them.
Eventually the waters of the Lake receded and the Nduru Beach women came up with a plan that seemed risky but made sense to them: Let’s go back to fishing.
Here’s the story of the unexpected revival of No Sex for Fish.