As a former sex worker and sex work activist, I have transformed my lived experience into collective resistance, leadership, and grassroots movement-building.
Sex workers are not problems to be solved, we are rights-holders, leaders, and powerful agents of change. We are a movement. We are system disruptors.
I was one of the founding members of Uganda’s sex worker movement back in 2008.
I am now the Executive Director of the Alliance of Women Advocating for Change (AWAC).
AWAC is a feminist, grassroots network founded on the principle that women sex workers must be at the centre of decisions that affect their lives. Born in 2015 from the fire of women sex workers’ activism, we exist to unite and strengthen the collective power of sex worker-led groups and organisations.
In Uganda, women sex workers experience multiple and intersecting forms of social, economic, health, and rights-based exclusion that affect their ability to live safely, access essential services, and exercise their sexual and reproductive rights. Stigma, discrimination, criminalisation, violence, economic insecurity, and limited access to decent livelihood opportunities continue to create significant barriers.
All these barriers are intersecting and compounded for sex workers experiencing additional vulnerabilities, for example, those living with disabilities, and those who are migrants or refugees.
For AWAC, women sex workers’ economic empowerment is liberation.
Economic empowerment is not charity, handouts, or dependency. Resources are power. Ownership is power. Economic independence is power.
This means building dignity, autonomy, control over resources, sustainable livelihoods, collective savings, entrepreneurship, access to markets, and decision-making power. When women sex workers control resources, we strengthen our power to make choices about our bodies, livelihoods, families, relationships, and futures.
Economic power expands our ability to resist exploitation, negotiate for safety, exercise our rights, and live with greater dignity and self-determination.
Economic empowerment is therefore an important pillar of reproductive justice.
This is why we have set up a land rental opportunity for AWAC’s grassroots members.
We are making portions of AWAC’s land available to women sex workers who wish to invest in productive livelihood activities. This may include crop production and horticulture, poultry and livestock farming, climate-smart agriculture, and culinary activities such as baking.
The objective is not simply to provide women sex workers with access to land for farming. Rather, the initiative seeks to enable them to generate sustainable income, build productive assets, make strategic investments, strengthen savings, diversify their livelihoods, enhance economic resilience, and increase their economic independence and decision-making power.
By opening access to its land, AWAC is seeking to ensure that organisational assets contribute to the wellbeing, independence, and collective strength of women sex workers.
We believe that women sex workers are rights holders, not passive beneficiaries.
At AWAC, we are not simply surviving systems that exclude us, we are building our own power, creating our own opportunities, owning our resources, and shaping our own futures.
We recognise that access to sexual and reproductive health and rights cannot be separated from the broader economic realities and structural inequalities that shape the lives of women sex workers. Reproductive autonomy requires not only access to services, but also the economic security, dignity, safety, information, and power necessary for women sex workers to make informed decisions about their bodies and reproductive lives without coercion or undue economic dependence.
AWAC is therefore not simply sowing seeds in the soil. We are sowing seeds of independence, economic power, autonomy, solidarity, resilience, and reproductive justice. We are creating pathways for women sex workers to move beyond survival towards greater economic security, self-determination, and collective liberation.
Ultimately, we seek a future where women sex workers move from survival to self-determination, collective power, and liberation.
By Kyomya Macklean, Executive Director of the Alliance of Women Advocating for Change (AWAC) a SAAF grantee partner in Uganda.