Colleague's E-mail is Invalid. Your message has been successfully sent to your colleague. Save my selection. Xavier g,i ; Kahn, Kathleen g,i ; Pettifor, Audrey a,f,g. Supplemental digital content is available for this article. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.
The data contains sensitive participant information. The authors did not include this clause in the ethical application and the participants in the study did not consent to sharing their data online. The ethics committee has advised that the authors to adhere to the agreement they had with the participants of this qualitative information - not to share their individual reports - but analyses from the study. The committee can share the themes related to the production of these analysis. These provide data we have used in developing the manuscript but without participant identifiers.
Transactional sex is a superset of sex work , in that the exchange of monetary reward for sex includes a broader set of usually non-marital obligations that do not necessarily involve a predetermined payment or gift, but where there is a definite motivation to benefit materially from the sexual exchange. The pervasiveness of transactional sex in sub-Saharan Africa, common in non-marital relationships across all income categories, is closely linked to socio-cultural expectations of gender whereby a man is expected to act as a provider to their partners and women expect a compensation for "giving" sex. This results in implicit assumptions of exchange, whereby for example a man might buy a woman a drink and her acceptance implies a willingness to have sex. Transactional sex is also becoming a vehicle for migration in places where younger women have intimate relationships with older men from, for example, Europe or North America.
Transactional sex seems to be a factor in shaping their vulnerability. But what is transactional sex exactly? What motivates young women and adolescent girls to engage in this practice?