Zimbabwean students are being sexually exploited to pay their tuition

Zimbabwean students, both male and female, are struggling to pay for higher education. Thanks to the economic meltdown that has been occurring in this country since the late 1990s, poverty has been endemic in the nation for years. But while in past decades, the Zimbabwean government still helped students pay for college, it cut back on this assistance in 2017. In response, a number of female Zimbabwean university students have begun to engage in transactional sex to pay their tuition and otherwise survive.

This situation can be traced back to 1927, during Zimbabwe’s colonial era. At that time the British government established the Department of Native Education and subsequently passed the Education Act, which allowed poor students to work for their tuition after school hours and during vacations and extended grants-in-aid to schools for certain students to be reimbursed after their studies. The Zimbabwean government did not abolish the act after achieving independence in 1980. In June 2017, however, a key program that helped marginalized students, like those from poor backgrounds and orphans, pay their school fees, known as the “cadetship program,” was suspended. At the same time, unemployment rates have been rising in Zimbabwe since 2008, when violent elections resulted in rampant murder, beatings, rape, death threats, abductions, arbitrary arrests, torture, forced displacement, property damage, harassment, intimidation, and terrorization. This has resulted in few parents being able to help their children with tuition and all other daily expenses while at school.

As in other nations, the costs of attending a Zimbabwean university add up quickly. In addition to tuition fees, students have to find living accommodations and pay for basic needs like food. These costs have caused an increasing number of students to resort to a range of strategies to cope, including, according to a 2011 study in the Journal of Sustainable Development in Africa, an increase in students having transactional sexual relationships with older men to meet their basic needs as well as, for some, improved social status and even grade inflation.

While engaging in this arrangement may seem like a choice, many of these transactional relationships are rooted in abuse and harassment. Take, for example, the relationship between female students and professors. According to a 2018 study, “lecturers use their positions of being in control of academic success in terms of marking and setting exams, so students tend to submit themselves for sex in return of academic favor in terms of higher marks in exams and tests.” According to the 2017 Female Students Network Trust Report, 74 percent of female students in institutions of higher education have been subjected to sexual harassment in return for “exam passes” by male staffers on campuses throughout Zimbabwe and they are afraid to come out in the open for fear of victimization.

This unequal power dynamic in which solicitors are the arbitrators of consent leaves female students vulnerable to negotiating safer sex, which in turn results in health issues that would have been otherwise preventable. Because transactional sex is viewed as “informal prostitution” or “subsistence sex work,” the young women engaging in it have few, if any, options for protection or recourse. According to UNAIDS, Zimbabwe has one of the highest HIV rates in sub-Saharan Africa at 13.3 percent; 1.3 million people were living with HIV in 2017. Women are disproportionately affected, particularly adolescent girls and young women, including those in university. One 2016 case study of a University in Bulawayo found that every month at least 10 percent of the student body needed treatment for sexually transmitted infections. According to a 2018 study in the journal Health Times, unwanted pregnancies are not uncommon as a result of these transactional relationships, and some female students even resort to committing suicide after learning they are pregnant, or otherwise die as a result of unsafe abortions.

To address this phenomenon, we must first address its roots. Zimbabwean colleges and the government need to take action to help increase financial aid for students, or at least provide other opportunities for students to make money while studying. The reasons women choose transactional sexual relationships often can hardly be considered a “choice” at all.