Eve Waruingi was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) during high school.

Waruingi, who lives in Nairobi, Kenya, was put on oral contraceptives to help regulate her period and manage other symptoms. But as she reached her 20s, the medication stopped working, and she began experiencing extreme pelvic pain and gaining weight.

“It has been so frustrating,” she said.

“The doctor advised me to work on my diet. When I went online to research on how best I could do that, I came across yoni pearls, which were described as herbal medicine.”

Waruingi began to read reviews of yoni pearls, whose advocates claimed to have been cured of PCOS through their use. Some even shared ultrasound scans of what appeared to be polycystic ovaries prior to and after using the ‘pearls’, which are small bags of herbs intended for insertion into the vagina.

In reality, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), PCOS is incurable and chronic.

Waruingi bought a set of yoni pearls from the online shopping website Jumia Kenya. As she saw the platform as a “trusted mainstream online retailer”, Waruingi assumed the suppositories had been medically approved by the Pharmacy and Poisons Board (PPB), Kenya’s drug regulatory authority.

Then the problems began.

“The thought of permanently getting cured of this condition was exciting,” she said. “But on using the second yoni pearl overnight as instructed, I started getting large blood clots and that definitely wasn’t menstruation. I was so scared.”

Alarmed by the clots, Waruingi read the product description and reviews again, which indicated that “whatever comes out of the vagina when using yoni pearls is a purging” and so, for a moment, her panic settled. But after using them for three nights, she developed an itchy, burning sensation and started getting a smelly, bloody discharge, which made her self-conscious in public.

“I was so scared of leaving the house because of the odour, which persisted despite me showering,” she said. “The discharge was heavy and non-stop. I had to carry extra underwear whenever I left home. The itchiness worsened and I was in so much pain.”

Waruingi finally decided to seek medical help. The gynaecological examination revealed that she had developed an internal infection caused by the contents of the yoni pearls.

“I was put on antibiotics for two weeks,” she said. “I had never experienced anything like that.” Fortunately, the treatment worked and the infection cleared.

Waruingi says she will never use any vaginal detox products again now she knows how dangerous they are.

Like many other online retailers and social media platforms, Jumia Kenya, a subsidiary of the Nigerian based e-commerce platform Jumia Group, is still promoting and selling a variety of ‘vaginal detox’ products such as yoni pearls, vaginal tightening gels and vaginal steaming herbs.

openDemocracy posed as a buyer on the retailer’s website and enquired about the safety of the yoni pearls on sale, asking if they had been approved by the relevant health authorities. A Jumia agent responded by saying that the company was “committed to offering customers 100 percent genuine products” and wouldn’t sell products whose quality was questionable.

“Our team works hard on regular quality checks and takes the necessary actions to ensure that any seller found to be selling non-genuine products is immediately delisted on Jumia,” the agent told openDemocracy during our conversation. “On rare occasions, some products may face some quality issues.”

In fact, the Pharmacy and Poisons Board had issued an alert in August, three months before we spoke to Jumia, advising against the use of yoni pearls on grounds of “quality, safety or efficacy”. It followed an investigation that found Facebook, YouTube, Google and Instagram had been profiting from content that posed a risk to the sexual and reproductive health of women in Kenya – including the promotion and sale of yoni pearls.

The investigation, by the organisation Fumbua, accused the internet giants of “structural racism” by failing to protect Kenyan women from being targeted with dangerous misinformation on unapproved medical treatments. According to Fumbua, which works to counter mis- and disinformation, products that claim to “cleanse, detoxify, or improve the health of the vagina” such as yoni pearls, yoni steams and yoni candies are being aggressively pushed at Kenyan women online.

Some ‘vaginal detox’ products, which doctors warn are “associated with injuries, bleeding, and infections”, have been banned in Canada. In the US, a class action lawsuit was filed against Goddess Detox, the company whose ‘pearls’ were barred from sale by Health Canada. Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle company Goop was also sued and fined $145,000 in 2018 by a US court for false advertising of ‘jade eggs’. Goop had claimed the product, different from yoni pearls but similarly intended for vaginal insertion, had a range of health benefits.

Leah Kimathi, the convenor of the Council for Responsible Social Media, said social media platforms such as Face were underinvesting “when it comes to the online safety of Kenyans and the rest of Africa compared to other parts of the world”.

Fumbua’s investigation found that social media platforms were allowing ads and sales of these products and disinformation about them aimed at local women.

“We have laws that address disinformation but they are interpersonal in nature,” said Wanjuri Nguhi Program Manager at Fumbua, referring to the fact that Kenya’s laws govern how people behave online but do not adequately police tech platforms. “We don’t have a framework that holds platforms accountable with regard to moderation of content.”

When contacted by openDemocracy, a spokesperson for Meta – which owns Facebook and Instagram – said: “We remove content that promotes harmful miracle cures for health issues when the treatments are widely deemed likely to directly contribute to the risk of serious injury or death.”

But a search openDemocracy conducted after receiving Meta’s comment found that yoni-related products were still being marketed on both Facebook and Instagram in Kenya, as well as on Google and YouTube. Google failed to respond at all when contacted by openDemocracy.

Kimathi says there must be a strengthening of the country’s regulatory environment for digital platforms.

“We must begin to hold social media companies to account,” she said. “We are cognisant that our laws have gaps and that is where organisations like the council that I convene comes in to do an audit on where to strengthen our regulatory environment.”

Kimathi said the Council for Responsible Social Media is working on instituting regulations that will protect Kenyans since the community guidelines spelled out by social media sites fail to do so.

She believes an Africa-wide framework and code of practice would provide the muscle required to enforce regulations that would protect Africans against big tech’s reckless operations in the region. Nguhi attributes the tech giants' blatant disregard for Kenyan women’s safety against such “predatory marketing” to a “lack of accountability on a structural level”.

“Our governments across the continent need to seriously think about regulation of these platforms as an urgent African need,” she said. “We need to work across the continent for this to be realised. It's important that audiences are protected from the harm that comes from this un-regulation.”

When asked by openDemocracy about the measures being taken to protect Kenyan women against the sale of these products, the drug regulatory board said only that ‘vaginal detox’ products were not under its mandate – despite having issued an alert about them in August.