A look at who is advertised, who is invisible, and what the research says about the women behind the listings.
The first thing a listing gives you is a number. Her age.
It sits near the top, beside a first name that may or may not be hers. It is also the first thing on the page that nobody can check.
I know how that number gets read, because I used to read it. In another life, as a client, I scanned ages the way you scan a menu: quickly, hungrily, and with total faith in the printed word.
I never asked who typed it. I never asked why it was twenty-four rather than thirty-one.
This piece started as an attempt to map those numbers. The idea was simple. Look at the age distribution of women advertising escort services in Kampala, and read the broader story of the city's economy in the curve.
I've decided not to do that, and the reasons are the article.
The Number Nobody Can Check
An age on an escort listing is a claim, not a measurement. It is shaded for marketing, rounded for taste, and rarely verified by anyone.
Counting listings by age bracket would give me tidy percentages that look like findings. They would only be a portrait of how women choose to present themselves to men with money. That is interesting, but it is a different subject.
There is a second reason. In Uganda, selling sex is criminalised. A woman who posts a profile has not consented to becoming a row in my spreadsheet.
My Sex Worker Visibility Project runs on a simple rule: nothing about a woman is published without her approval. Harvesting her advert to build a dataset would break that rule in spirit, whatever the technical defence.
So I went looking for people who had asked the women directly, with ethics approval, consent forms, and no commercial interest in the answer.
They exist. What they found is more useful than any count I could have made, and it complicates the neat story I came in with.
The Women Behind the Median
Start with the oldest question: how old are the women who sell sex in Kampala?
Two respondent-driven surveys of women in greater Kampala give a baseline. One ran in 2008–09 and one in 2012, and both are published in open-access journals.
The 2012 survey enrolled 1,497 women, and the median age was 27. The middle half fell between 23 and 32.
The earlier survey, of 942 women, found a median age of 26. Nearly half were between 15 and 24. The median age at which women first sold sex was 22. For 57 percent, sex work was their only source of income.
Notice what is missing from those findings: a cliff at twenty-five, and a population of girls and a population of grandmothers.
The distribution is broad and centred in the mid-to-late twenties. That is a younger average than most people assume and an older one than the stereotype suggests.
These are surveys of women found through clinics and peer networks. They describe the visible edge of a hidden population, not all of it. Even so, they are the closest thing to ground truth the field has.
The Basket and the Street
Then there is the finding that changed how I read the original outline.
In 2022, a team of researchers published a qualitative study in BMC Women's Health, led by Kenneth Roger Katumba. They interviewed twenty women in and around Kampala. Ten were recruited through a clinic and typically met clients in bars, lodges, and on the street. Ten were recruited through Instagram and snowball referrals and met clients online.
The two groups did not resemble each other.
Among the ten who met clients online, eight held bachelor's degrees. Six said sex work was not their main occupation. Most were between twenty-five and thirty, and several held professional jobs or were studying toward them.
In the clinic group, most had little or no formal education.
Women in physical venues had a word for their online counterparts: bikapu, the plural of kikapu, a large basket you can carry anywhere, whose contents only the owner knows.
It is a good metaphor. The kikapu worker is mobile, discreet, and invisible to the street. She is not hustling at the corner, and her neighbours may never know.
The money gap was stark. One online-recruiting woman reported a typical month of eight to fifteen million shillings (roughly US$2,000 to $4,000). Some street-based women reported earning a few dollars a day, or nothing at all when clients refused to pay.
These are twenty women, and the authors say plainly that their sample cannot speak for everyone. But the pattern fits the broader literature on how platforms change who does sex work and under what conditions.
Who Is Missing From the Screen
Here is where the original outline's logic starts to wobble.
It assumed an "early entry" bracket of eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-olds, fresh from student life and arriving online. The research suggests the opposite.
A study of young female sex workers aged fifteen to twenty-four in a Kampala HIV prevention trial found mobile phone ownership at roughly 68 percent, and lower among the fifteen-to-nineteen group. Social media use was very low. SMS was the dominant tool.
Uganda also introduced a tax on social media use in 2018, which makes data-hungry platforms expensive for people already short of money.
Being online takes a smartphone, data, a decent photograph, and the confidence to negotiate in writing with strangers. Those are not trivial barriers, and they fall hardest on the youngest and poorest.
So the digital sex market is probably not a mirror of Kampala's sex work. It is a filter, and it tends to favour women who are older, better educated, and better connected.
There is a harder implication. If the youngest and most vulnerable women are the least likely to be online, then the platforms are not where the most dangerous exploitation shows up. It hides where nobody is looking: in the street, in the lodge, in the arrangement set up by someone else.
It also means any listing that appears to show a very young woman deserves suspicion, not interest. In a country where adolescent sex workers have been described by researchers as largely invisible, an advertised age proves nothing, and the cost of being wrong is not abstract.
The Arithmetic of Opportunity
Why does the door stay open?
The numbers on Kampala's youth labour market do some of the explaining. The 2021 National Labour Force Survey by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics found that 41 percent of Ugandans aged eighteen to thirty were neither employed nor in education or training.
A UN Women analysis of earlier household survey data found that 37 percent of young women aged fifteen to twenty-four were in that position, against 21 percent of young men.
Place those figures beside what the women told researchers. They described economic need as the main reason for entering sex work: abandonment by a partner, the loss of a parent, school fees that could not be paid, rent, and the collapse of income during COVID-19.
They stayed because no comparable income was available. Most said they would leave for marriage, or for stable work that paid something close to what they were earning.
There is a quieter finding in the online group. Their costs were different. They had to keep up appearances: apartments, clothes, phones, the grooming that an online presence demands. One woman described a lifestyle that, once started, becomes expensive to abandon.
I recognise that trap from the client's side of the ledger. The woman behind the polished listing is often running a small business with real overheads and a reputation to protect.
Bounded Authenticity, and the Woman Who Isn't Twenty-Two
Which brings me back to the question I started with, and to a harder one about the men reading the numbers.
Elizabeth Bernstein's Temporarily Yours (2007) gave us the phrase "bounded authenticity". It describes a transaction in which the client wants something that feels genuine, within clear limits of time and money, without the obligations of an ordinary relationship.
I wrote about this in an earlier piece, and I still think it describes something true about why many men pay. What we are often purchasing is the texture of being wanted, with the risk of rejection taken out.
Seen that way, age on a listing is partly a statement about which fiction the client wants. For some men, youth is the product. For others, it is the opposite: conversation, ease, a woman who has learned to read a room.
I can't tell you which men prefer which, because I have no data on client preferences in Kampala, and I won't pretend to. But I can say what the novel I wrote, The Homeless Diaries, circles around. Wolfgang Storm, my fictional protagonist, drifts toward women who seem to know exactly what he needs and have no illusions about him.
The women in the research did not describe that skill as a gift. They described it as labour.
Elyse, an interviewee in my own project, once gave me a line I haven't been able to shake: some men cannot tell the difference between an erotic moan and endurance. The research says something similar in drier language. Women in Katumba's study described acting soft, acting submissive, and acting as though they were enjoying what a client wanted, because the alternative was violence.
That is the other half of bounded authenticity. The client's authentic moment is built from the worker's performance, and she carries the cost.
There is a cultural dimension too. In Uganda and across the Great Lakes region, a tradition known as kachabali, or kunyaza in Rwanda, treats female pleasure as the measure of good lovemaking. In Buganda, the ssenga tradition has long handed down sexual knowledge between women.
I mention this only because it points the same way as everything else. Attention, timing, and responsiveness are skills, and they are old ones. Whoever is paid for them is doing real work.
The Risk Nobody Lists
I promised myself this article would not read as a brochure, so here is what the profile pages leave out.
Katumba and colleagues found that online-recruiting women faced threats their street-based peers mostly did not: hacked accounts, extortion by clients who refused to pay, and former clients who sold their confidentiality.
Many met men at private addresses or hotels and worked alone, with no guard at the door and no colleague who knew where they were.
And because selling sex is illegal in Uganda, they described being unable to report rape or violence for fear of prosecution and public exposure. Many were professionals or students, with the most to lose from being identified.
Research from the UK on online sex work has found a similar pattern: workers build layered "blended" safety strategies, and still face crime that existing systems are poorly equipped to handle.
So the polished, discreet, digitally fluent worker is not safe because she is polished. She is working harder at safety than almost anyone, in conditions the law makes nearly impossible to improve.
What the Number Was Hiding
If I had counted listings, I would have produced a bar chart with a bulge in the twenties and told you it proved something about the economy.
What I found instead is an argument. Age on a screen is a marketing choice. The real demographic story is about who can get online, who can afford to, who is educated enough and connected enough to run a discreet business, and who is left in the street or in someone else's control.
It is also about the men on the other side of the screen, who read a number and assume it is an answer.
I think that is the most honest thing I can say about my own years as a client. I looked at the number and never wondered what it cost the woman who wrote it.
The question worth asking is not how old she is. It is what her life has to look like for this to be her best option, and what it would take for it not to be.
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