“When I came to Nairobi, I looked for a job but I couldn’t find a job. That’s when I turned to sex work and started selling my body, so that I could earn a living.”

The quotation is from Monica, a young woman in her mid-twenties who lives in Nairobi’s enormous Kibera slum. But it could be any one of dozens of young women we have met in the course of shooting segments about women, sex work, and HIV in the slums and poor areas of Nairobi over the last several years.

CHC is currently producing a film that explores issues of poverty, gender, sex, and HIV at a range of sites, and through a variety of perspectives. We go into the heart of the slums with social workers, and we get the perspective of university professors and advocates. But mostly, we speak to sex workers and former sex workers, as we learn about the desperation that drives them to risk HIV for as little as 75 cents.

Here are some images we have taken while working on this project.