Toiling on a Kenyan flower farm to send fresh 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.

In early 2023, Anne fell ill with a blood condition, which, if untreated, could be deadly.

She felt weak and suffered shortness of breath, which made working extremely difficult.

She went to see a nurse at the farm who gave her medicine and allowed her to rest for a few hours, after which he told her to return to work.

“I told him: ‘You know, I’m too sick to work,'” Anne recounts.

Anne says it was tough to convince the nurse she was genuinely ill, but he eventually agreed to refer her to an off-farm doctor.

She was allowed 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 could not meet her target that day.

Anne worries about other ways in which her work on the flower farm may harm her health – for example, the unfamiliar chemicals she was asked to use to spray the roses.

It is a concern shared by many other workers.

Margaret, another flower picker on a nearby farm, says workers are routinely forced to spray chemicals on flowers without being given protective gear.

Margaret (not her real name) insisted we meet her at the home of a colleague after dark, in their tiny dwelling not far from the shores of Lake Naivasha.

She is afraid to speak out for fear of retribution from the flower industry, and says their influence is everywhere in Naivasha.

“Nobody cares,” she adds.

A report in September 2023 by the Nairobi-based NGO, Route To Food Initiative, showed that highly hazardous pesticides are routinely used in Kenyan farming, some known to cause cancer.

Margaret says she has repeatedly approached her bosses about her concerns.

“They shout to the men, they shout to the women,” she says. “They shout to everybody. They don’t care, and they are Kenyans.”

She says women can also face sexual harassment from male workers – the industry has been marred with complaints.

We put the allegations of sexual harassment, unpaid overtime, harsh working conditions, and lack of protective gear on some flower farms in Naivasha to both the Kenya Flower Council and the Kenya Plant Health Inspectorate Service (KEPHIS), the government agency responsible for monitoring the industry, but neither got back to us.

Kenya’s flower business also has a significant cost for the environment at large.

The production of flowers requires a great deal of water, and to feed the European appetite for cheap cut flowers, the blooms are transported refrigerated in long-haul, gas-guzzling jets, wrapped in single-use plastic, and are usually arranged in toxic floral foam to keep them fresh.

Kenya supplies more than 40% of the flower market in Europe, with the vast majority of blooms destined for the Netherlands, the hub for the European cut flower industry.

Flowers arrive daily by plane and are taken to the huge, frenetic flower market in the picturesque town of Aalsmeer, where they are bought and distributed to suppliers across Europe.

Here lorries arrive by the minute and tourists gaze down from walkways as huge trolleys of flowers of all colours are moved around at speed, as far as the eye can see.

In supermarkets and florists across Europe, consumers buy the cheap flowers to mark important events like marriages and birthdays, with no way of tracing their provenance or hearing the experiences of those like Anne and Margaret that have toiled, thousands of kilometres away, to produce them.

As a single mother with a son who needs her support, Anne feels she has no choice but to continue to work in the flower industry. There are few other opportunities in Naivasha and she is afraid to be left with no income at all.

“If God helps me,” Anne says, “I will move on.”