I am a professor of ethnology and my current research interests are gender, sexuality and poverty in urban Africa. My current research project is ACACIA - LGBTQI+ and Street-level bureaucrats: Assessing Motives, Violence and Possibilities for Collective Advocacy in East Africa. It will study these issues in Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda.
Using 230 interviews with mostly Muslim women, I study poverty and gender in urban Tanzania, focusing on transactional sex, child marriage and forced marriage, and how the labour of the poor is reproduced in the neoliberal city. Marriage under 18 is common in most of Africa. Many girls themselves want to marry young. Why? Social, economic and cultural pressures together provide an explanation.
