Africa

Kenya’s flower industry: How farmworkers toil to export roses to Europe

On a moonless night in the Kenyan lakeside town of Naivasha, Anne sits inside a makeshift, two-room house, exhausted after a gruelling shift picking and sorting roses.

Anne (not her real name) is a single mother and one of thousands of the predominantly female workers in Kenya’s flower industry, harvesting and categorising blooms in one of the many greenhouse complexes around the edge of the picturesque Lake Naivasha, about 90km (56 miles) north-west of the capital, Nairobi.

Inside endless rows of the temperature-controlled greenhouses the size of tennis courts, workers like Anne harvest a huge variety of flowers that grow profusely in the rich Kenyan soil.

There are carnations, chrysanthemums, and an abundance of roses in almost every hue. The majority of these blooms are destined for Europe.

Anne has spent over 15 years working in Kenya’s burgeoning flower industry, one of the largest employers in the country.

Estimates suggest it employs more than 150,000 people and earns the country around $1bn (£760m) annually in foreign exchange.

Despite dedicating her working life to the industry, she says her monthly pay of just over $100 has barely changed in years.

It is not enough to contend with the worsening cost-of-living crisis in Kenya, which has pushed up the prices of essential household goods such as maize, wheat, rice and sugar.

At the end of each month, Anne does not have enough to eat and often has to skip meals.

“You have to enter into debt to survive,” she says, pointing out that she had to take out a loan to help her 23-year-old son attend university in Nairobi.

Each sunrise Anne queues with hundreds of other workers to catch one of the company buses that takes them to the farms, as the gentle fog lingers over the hills before being evaporated by the blazing mid-morning sun.

Anne starts work at 07:30, six days a week. On Sunday, she goes to church.

The working day at her flower farm is meant to be eight hours, but she explains that she often feels obliged to work an extra three hours, for which she does not receive overtime pay.

She used to work inside the pack house, where the flowers were cleaned, bunched, and sorted into stems.

She recounts that the conditions there were harsh.

The flower company gave her stringent daily targets, which the managers pressured the workers to meet.

“We had to grade 3,700 stems a day,” she says.

Anne feels these targets were unrealistic, but she says workers like her had no choice but to deliver, or the farm managers would sanction them.

If she missed her daily target, she had to write a statement to her manager explaining the reasons for falling short.

“If you don’t achieve it, maybe you can be thrown out,” she says.


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