On a moonless night in the Kenyan lakeside town of Naivasha, Anne sits in a makeshift two-room house, exhausted after a grueling shift picking and sorting roses.
Anne (not her real name) is a single mother and one of thousands of mostly female workers in Kenya’s flower industry. She harvests and sorts flowers in one of the many greenhouse complexes on the edge of picturesque Lake Naivasha, about 90km northwest of the capital Nairobi.
In endless rows of temperature-controlled greenhouses the size of tennis courts, workers like Anne harvest a huge variety of flowers that grow lushly in the fertile Kenyan soil.
There are carnations, chrysanthemums and an abundance of roses in almost every colour. Most of these flowers are destined for Europe.
Anne has worked for over 15 years in Kenya’s fast-growing flower industry, one of the country’s largest employers.
It is estimated that over 150,000 people are employed there and that the country earns around $1 billion (£760 million) in foreign exchange annually.
Despite devoting her working life to the industry, she says her monthly salary of just over $100 has barely changed in recent years.
It is not enough to address the rising cost of living 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 go 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.
Every sunrise, Anne lines up with hundreds of other workers to board one of the company buses that take them to the farms, as a soft mist hangs over the hills before being dissipated by the blazing morning sun.
Anne starts work at 7:30, six days a week. On Sundays she goes to church.
At her flower farm, she normally works eight hours a day, but she explains that she often feels obliged to work an extra three hours, for which she does not receive overtime pay.
She worked in the warehouse, where the flowers were cleaned, bunched and sorted into stems.
She says the conditions there were tough.
The flower company gave it strict daily targets, which managers pushed employees to meet.
“We had to sort 3,700 stems a day,” she says.
Anne believes these targets were unrealistic, but she says workers like her had no choice but to meet them, or else company leaders would impose sanctions.
If she did not meet her daily goal, she had to write a statement to her manager explaining the reasons.
“If you don’t, you might get thrown out,” she says.
In early 2023, Anne fell ill with a blood disease that, if left untreated, can be fatal.
She felt weak and had shortness of breath, which made it difficult for her to work.
She went to a nurse on the farm, who gave her medicine and let her rest for a few hours, then told her to go back to work.
“I told him, ‘You know, I’m too sick to work,’” Anne says.
Anne says it was difficult to convince the nurse that she was really ill, but he eventually agreed to refer her to a doctor outside the farm.
She was given only one day off, despite still feeling weak and being treated for a serious illness.
“It felt bad because I was still sick,” she says.
To make matters worse, she had to write a letter to her manager explaining why she had not met her goal that day.
Anne worries about other ways her work at the flower farm could harm her health, such as the unfamiliar chemicals she has to use to spray the roses.
It’s a concern shared by many other employees.
Margaret, another flower picker on a nearby farm, says workers routinely have to spray chemicals on flowers without wearing protective clothing.
Margaret (not her real name) insisted that we meet her after sunset at a colleague’s house, in their small cottage not far from the shores of Lake Naivasha.
She is afraid to speak out for fear of reprisals from the flower industry, which she believes is everywhere in Naivasha.
“Nobody cares,” she adds.
A report in September 2023 A study by Nairobi-based NGO Route To Food Initiative found that highly dangerous pesticides, some of which are carcinogenic, are routinely used in Kenyan agriculture.
Margaret says she has repeatedly raised her concerns with her bosses.
“They’re shouting at the men, they’re shouting at the women,” she says. “They’re shouting at everyone. They don’t care, and they’re Kenyans.”
She says women can also face sexual harassment from male employees, with the industry flooded with complaints.
We have taken the allegations of sexual harassment, unpaid overtime, poor working conditions and lack of protective equipment at a number of flower farms in Naivasha to both the Kenya Flower Council and the Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Service (KEPHIS), the government agency responsible for overseeing the sector, but neither has responded.
The Kenyan flower sector also comes with significant costs to the environment.
Flower production requires a lot of water. To meet the European demand for cheap cut flowers, the flowers are transported in refrigerated, long, fuel-guzzling planes. They are wrapped in single-use plastic and usually placed in toxic floral foam to keep them fresh.
Kenya supplies more than 40% of the flower market in Europe. The vast majority of the flowers are destined for the Netherlands, the centre of the European cut flower industry.
Flowers arrive daily by plane and are taken to the huge, bustling flower market in the picturesque town of Aalsmeer, where they are purchased and distributed to suppliers throughout Europe.
Trucks arrive here at any moment and tourists stare from the walkways at the huge carts full of flowers in all colours being driven around at high speed, as far as the eye can see.
In supermarkets and florists across Europe, consumers buy cheap flowers to celebrate important events such as weddings and birthdays. But they don’t know where the flowers come from or the experiences of people like Anne and Margaret who have toiled thousands of miles away to produce them.
As a single mother with a son who needs her support, Anne feels she has no choice but to continue working in the flower industry. There are few other options in Naivasha and she fears she will be left without an income altogether.
“If God helps me,” says Anne, “I will go on.”
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