Journalist & Documentary Producer/Director
I have over 15 years’ experience as a multimedia journalist and documentary producer in Africa, the Middle East, North America and Europe focusing on social justice, conflict and displacement. Starting out as a news reporter and editor for newspapers run by Trinity Mirror, the UK’s largest publisher, I moved in to news and documentaries for outlets including the BBC, Reuters, TIME and Al Jazeera, based in London, Nairobi and New York.
During the 2020 US Presidential Election, I produced live and short daily news reports focusing on racial justice, systemic racism, minorities and heroes who fought the system.
Previously, I reported on women trafficked from Tanzania to England to work as maids and underground forced child labour clothing factories in India for six-part BBC World News documentary series, Working Lives: Human Traffic.
Reporting in Africa has always been my passion. I moved to Kenya from the UK, to base myself in the region my family fled as Ugandan refugees in the 1970s. I produced/directed short documentaries on sociopolitical topics around the continent. Mother Liberia and Sankara’s Ghost were shortlisted for Best Documentary at the Al-Jazeera International Film Festival and the Kalasha International Film & Television Awards. While making films, I also reported for Reuters’ news video service, Africa Journal.
As part of The New Humanitarian’s peace-building coverage, I explored in a long-form news feature, how far there had been reconciliation in northern Uganda following a decades-long conflict. I reported on the landmark trial of former Lord’s Resistance Army child soldier turned warlord Dominic Ongwen at the International Criminal Court. Interviews with the women he abducted to be his ‘war wives’ revealed conflicted views on his sentence reflecting some of the nuances of how his conviction was received in this war-torn region still in the midst of recovery. For TIME magazine, I reported on children who scrambled unaccompanied on to the last flights leaving Afghanistan during the Taliban takeover. The story was longlisted for a Refugee Reporting Award at the One World Media Awards 2023.
My independent work includes producing/directing Shine Your Light, a short portrait documentary about inspiring Kenyan women for International Women’s Day with an all-women crew and creating an online multimedia platform with California-based software engineers to tell survival stories globally. The Stories Of Survival project aimed to connect survivors through their first-person stories to advocate healing and empathy. It grew as journalists from around the world sent in content for publication. Passionate about the idea, they narrated personal stories not appearing in the mainstream media. In 2021, the project was selected as part of an entrepreneurial journalism Creators’ Lab at the City University of New York.
I have a BSc (Hons) in Artificial Intelligence & Psychology from The University of Birmingham and a postgraduate qualification in Print Journalism accredited by the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ).