A look at the Kenyan tabloids also suggests that women are at risk of violence from their sponsors. What is wrong about sex anyway?" asks Jane. "People just make it sound wrong. But sometimes, it ain't wrong at all." Grace, a 25-year-old single mum from northern Nairobi, has a regular sponsor, but is actively seeking a more lucrative relationship with a man who will invest in her career as a singer. Phamotse eventually fled her abuser, with nothing to show for the relationship. "I had to escape so I didn't find any financial privilege," she says. "I left the house and the car, and had to rebuild my life." But as most of those dependent on sugar relationships are female, they have dominated the public debate. There are concerns about the morality of their lifestyle, but also about its consequences for their health.

Until recently there was no data to indicate how many young Kenyan women are involved in sugar relationships. But this year the Busara Centre for Behavioural Economics conducted a study for BBC Africa in which they questioned 252 female university students between the ages of 18 and 24. They found that approximately 20% of the young women who participated in the research has or has had a "sponsor." Six years ago, when she was at university, Shiro met a married man nearly 40 years her senior. At first, she received just groceries. Then it was trips to the salon. Two years into their relationship, the man moved her into a new apartment because he wanted her to be more comfortable. Another two years down the line, he gave Shiro a plot of land in Nyeri county as a show of commitment. In exchange, he gets to sleep with Shiro whenever he feels like it.She is poor by the standards of middle-class Kenyans, often living hand-to-mouth, dancing for cash in a nightclub, and struggling to put her daughter through school. But her determination to feed and educate her child coexists with a naked ambition to become rich and famous through modelling and music. Transactional sex was once driven by poverty, says film-maker Nyasha Kadandara. But now, increasingly, it's driven by vanity. Among them are the stars of the reality TV show Nairobi Diaries, Kenya's own blend of Keeping up with the Kardashians and The Real Housewives of Atlanta. The show has launched several socialites out of Nairobi's slums and on to yachts off the coast of Malibu or the Mediterranean. There has been a rising growth of the women's movement in Africa and a rising feminist consciousness," says Oyunga Pala, the Nairobi columnist. "Women who were vilified for being sexually active have been given license to just be. There is less slut-shaming than before."

Mildred Ngesa, an ambassador for the global activist group Female Wave of Change, makes a similar argument. After decades of women struggling for the right to vote, to own land, to go to school, she argues, the "choice" to engage in sugar relationships is steeped in contradiction. I prefer the sponsor thing, rather than standing on the street," she says. "Because you have that one person who is supporting you… you don't need to sleep with so many men." It's not hard to find headlines such as "Stabbed to death by a man who has been funding her university education," "Kenyan 'sponsor' threatens lover, posts COFFINS on Facebook and she DIES afterwards," "Pretty 22-Year-Old Girl Killed By Her Sugar Daddy." These articles all describe, sometimes in graphic detail, sugar relationships that led to murder. Older men have always used gifts, status, and influence to buy access to young women. The sugar daddy has probably been around, in every society, for as long as the prostitute. So you might ask: "Why even have a conversation about transactional sex in Africa?"For many young Kenyans, the values espoused in families, schools, and churches simply do not align with the economic realities of the country, or cannot compete with the material temptations that, in the age of reality TV and social media, are everywhere visible. Both Alfred and her other sponsor, James, prefer not to use condoms, she says. In fact she has had unprotected sex with multiple sugar daddies, who then have sex with other women, as well as with their wives, exposing all of these partners to the risk of sexually transmitted diseases. Jane, a 20-year-old Kenyan undergraduate who readily admits to having two sponsors, sees nothing shameful in such relationships - they are just part of the everyday hustle that it takes to survive in Nairobi, she says.