Truckers of Shame – Climate-Induced Hunger Fuels Underage Sex Trade Along Southern Africa’s Trade Routes

A darker cloud is befalling underage girls along Southern Africa’s trade routes as the extreme weather crisis fuels desperate survival sex among the region’s youngest and most impoverished rural women. ‘I don’t do it because I want to. It’s hunger,’ Flores Sindi* says to FairPlanet. Sindi is a 17-year-old school dropout in Mudzi on the Zimbabwe-Mozambique northeast border district, where scores of teenage girls like her engage in transactional paid sex with international haulage truck drivers who shuttle lithium for export, mining gear, or commercial supermarket foodstuffs between Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, and South Africa.