Major South African shopping mall closes due to protest and violence
Maponya Mall in Soweto, Johannesburg, has been closed as protests erupt following the violent murder of an e-hailing driver.
Africa Eye investigation has revealed how women, known as "madams," have involved girls as young as 13 in prostitution in Kenya.
In the transit town of Maai Mahiu in Kenya's Rift Valley, trucks and vans ply the streets day and night, transporting goods and people across the country to Uganda, Rwanda, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
This major transport hub, located just 50 km east of the capital, Nairobi, is known for prostitution, but it is also a breeding ground for child sexual abuse.
Two undercover investigators, posing as sex workers who wanted to learn to be "madams," spent months earlier this year infiltrating the city's sex trade.
Their secret filming reveals two different women who claim to know it is illegal and then introduces the investigators to underage girls from the sex industry.
The BBC handed over all its evidence to the Kenyan police in March. The BBC believes the "madams" have since changed locations. The police said the women and girls we filmed could not be located. To date, no arrests have been made.
Convictions are rare in Kenya. For prosecutions to be successful, police need the girls' testimony. Vulnerable children are often too afraid to testify.
Grainy BBC footage filmed on the street in the dark showed a woman, who calls herself Nyambura, laughing as she said: "They are still children, so it's easy to manipulate them just by giving them candy."
"Prostitution is a cash crop in Maai Mahiu; the truckers basically feed it. And that's how we benefit. It's become normalized in Maai Mahiu," he explains, adding that he has a daughter, barely 13, who has already been "working" for six months.
"It becomes very risky when you're dealing with minors. You can't take them out openly in the city. I only sneak them out at night very quietly," says Nyambura.
The act of consensual prostitution is not explicitly criminalized in Kenyan national law, but it is prohibited by many municipal bylaws. It is not prohibited in Maai Mahiu, which is part of Nakuru County.
According to the penal code, it is illegal to live off the earnings of prostitution, whether as a sex worker or as a third party who facilitates or benefits from prostitution.
Trafficking or selling minors under 18 years of age is punishable by prison terms of 10 years to life.
When asked if clients brought condoms, Nyambura said he usually made sure they had protection, but some didn't.
"Some kids want to earn more (that's why they don't use them). Others are forced (not to use them)," he says.
At another meeting, he led the undercover investigator to a house where three young girls were sitting huddled on a couch and another in a hard-backed chair.
Nyambura then left the room, giving the researcher the opportunity to speak alone with the girls.
They described how they were sexually abused on a daily basis.
"Sometimes you have sex with several people. The clients force you to do unimaginable things," says one of the girls.
There are no recent statistics on the number of children forced into the sex industry in Kenya. In 2012, the U.S. Department of State's National Report on Human Rights Practices in Kenya cited an estimate of 30,000, a figure provided by the Kenyan government and the now-defunct nongovernmental organization (NGO) End Child Prostitution in Kenya.
Maponya Mall in Soweto, Johannesburg, has been closed as protests erupt following the violent murder of an e-hailing driver.
At least 40 people have been killed in an attack on a camp for displaced people in Sudan's western Darfur region, according to an aid group that works there.
An early morning operation by the Nigerian army took out more than 100 armed gang members in the country's northwest, the military said. The area is rife with mass abductions and attacks on villages.