Sub-Saharan Africa

Prostitution in Burkina Faso operates in a largely grey area dictated by its French colonial legal heritage. While the isolated exchange of sex for money is not explicitly outlawed, the overarching Penal Code aggressively targets all associated and organizational activities. Influenced heavily by international conventions, recent decades have seen the government drastically escalate legislative crackdowns on human trafficking, pimping, and child exploitation networks.

Kenya officially outlaws the facilitation and public execution of sex work under the prevailing Penal Code, which actively criminalizes pimping, brothel-keeping, and living off earnings derived from prostitution. While the independent sale of sex in privacy isn't categorically stated as a crime, sweeping county municipal bylaws constantly target soliciting and loitering, resulting in rampant systemic police harassment and a highly vulnerable grey market.

Mauritania vehemently outlaws every facet of the sex trade, governed entirely under an unyielding interpretation of Sharia law fused within the national Penal Code. Any engagement in adultery, fornication, or commercial sex results in devastating legal and physical punishments, ensuring absolutely no formalized or structured red-light economy can legally or safely exist anywhere in the country.

South Africa totally prohibits all functions of the sex trade, anchored by the sweeping 1957 Sexual Offences Act which criminalizes selling, purchasing, brothel-keeping, and pimping. Despite constant structural debates post-Apartheid to decriminalize the sector and protect vulnerable labor pools, legislation remains fiercely punitive, ensuring one of the continent's largest and most visible sex industries operates completely devoid of legal protection.