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Eva, a year-old student at Nairobi Aviation College, was sitting in her tiny room in shared quarters in Kitengela feeling broke, hungry, and desperate. She used the remaining Kenyan shillings she had in her wallet and took a bus to the city centre, where she looked for the first man who would pay to have sex with her.

After 10 minutes in a dingy alley, Eva went back to Kitengela with 1, Kenyan shillings to feed herself for the rest of the month. Six years ago, when she was at university, Shiro met a married man nearly 40 bbc gay bareback 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.

Eva's experience is transactional sex in its most unvarnished form - a hurried one-off encounter, driven by desperation. Shiro's story illustrates an altogether more complex phenomenon - the exchange of youth and beauty for long-term financial gain, motivated not by hunger but by aspiration, glamorised by social media stars, and often wrapped in the trappings of a relationship.

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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? The answer is that in Kenya, and in some other African countries, "sugar" relationships seem to have become both bbc gay bareback common and more visible: what once was hidden is now out in the open - on campuses, in bars, and all over Instagram.

Exactly when this happened is hard to say. It could've been in when Kim Kardashian's infamous sex tape was leaked, or a little later when Facebook and Instagram took over the world, or perhaps when 3G internet hit Africa's mobile phones. But somehow, we have arrived at a point where having a "sponsor" or a "blesser" - the terms that millennials usually apply to their benefactors - has for many young people become an accepted, and even a glamorous lifestyle choice.

You only have to visit the student districts of Nairobi, one recent graduate told the BBC, to see how pervasive the sponsor culture has become. 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 female university students between the ages of 18 and The sample size was small and the study was not fully randomised, so the results only give an indication of the possible numbers, they cannot be taken as definitive.

Also, only a small percentage openly admitted to having a sugar daddy; the researchers were able to infer that a number were hiding the truth from answers they gave to other questions, using a technique called list randomisation. Jane, a 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 bbc gay bareback in Nairobi, she says.

She also insists that her relationships with Tom and Jeff, both married, involve friendship and intimacy as well as financial exchange. It's like they just want company, they want someone to talk to," she says. She says that her religious parents brought her up with traditional values, but she has made her own choices.

One of her motives, she says, is to be able to support her younger sisters, so they won't need to rely on men for money. But she has also been inspired by Kenya's celebrity "socialites" - women who have transformed sex appeal into wealth, becoming stars of social media. The show has launched several socialites out of Nairobi's slums and on to yachts off the coast of Malibu or the Mediterranean.

If I look hot, I look good, there has got be some rich guy who will pay good money to possess me," says Oyunga Pala, Nairobi columnist and social commentator. The best known of the Kenyan socialites is probably Vera Sidika, who went from dancing in music videos on to the set of the Nairobi Diaries, and from there launched a business career based on her fame and her physique.

Nowadays, Vera is keen to promote herself as an entrepreneur, and runs a successful brand of "detox" herbal infusions called Veetox Tea. Equally famous is model and socialite Huddah Monroe, who also rose to fame on reality TV - in her case Big Brother Africa, in - and who now runs a well-established line of cosmetics.

In the past, some of Kenya's socialites have styled themselves as SlayQueens, and have been quite upfront about the financial benefits that have come from dating tycoons.