No Sex For Fish. This is the simple concept changing the lives of women in the Lake Victoria region of Kenya.

Oh, you're not following what sex and fish have to do with each other? Then let’s think this through. When food is scarce and jobs unavailable to women, many are forced to turn to trading their bodies for the food they and their families need.

This is unfortunately not a new story. What is new, is that a grassroots organization in Kenya, The Victoria Institute of Environment and Development, is working to change this with a powerful market based approach: give women fishing boats and make THEM the managers of fish production. As you can see in the video above, with women in charge, the region has seen a fall off in the all too present practice of “Jaboya”- trading sex for fish.

Beyond the impressively simple financial innovation empowering these women, there is another lesson here.

The scarcity of food did not happen because of drought or famine or a lack of hard work by those living in the area. Instead, the cause of the scarcity of fish is clearly pollution. The Lake Victoria region has seen fish production fall as the water and the surrounding wetlands were destroyed by pollution. This pollution made fish more scarce, driving up the price of fish, and forcing women to trade their bodies for the scarce food. This is one of the clearest examples of how pollution connects to extreme poverty and the exploitation of people.

So in this powerful video from our partners at Take Part, you can see how pollution is connected to extreme poverty, how women are often the most vulnerable to these problems, and how a grassroots led financial campaign can revolutionize the lives of the people involved.

Watch the video and then go to TAKE ACTION NOW and sign the petition to protect girls and women around the world.Pollution, food scarcity, and poverty are taking a toll on girls and women around the world, it is time we all acted to give them the tools to raise themselves and their communities above these challenges.