The Baby Stealers
Commissioned by BBC
“A brave, impactful, relevant film with an incredibly important story to tell. To produce such a complex investigation with a local team undercover is an extraordinary feat. Finding people who can operate in this environment, running such risk, takes years. Huge respect for the ambition of the journalism and the commitment to the story.”
-Sony Impact Award for Current Affairs Jury
This year-long investigation by BBC Africa Eye uncovered damning evidence of a thriving underground network of stolen children in Kenya. This secretive and highly lucrative trade preys on the country’s most vulnerable, stealing kids from homeless women and even from the maternity ward of a major government hospital in the heart of Nairobi.
Njeri and Judith cultivated a network of whistleblowers in order to infiltrate and secretly record several active child trafficking networks that targeted Kenya’s poorest women. The release of the film sparked a huge public outcry in Kenya and led to the immediate shutting down of three highly prolific child trafficking networks, the arrest of traffickers exposed in the investigation and the establishment of a Kenyan government task force dedicated to ending child trafficking.
Biographies
Njeri Mwangi is a mother, a human rights activist and co-founder of Pawa254, a Nairobi-based collaborative hub where journalists, artists and activists meet to find innovative ways of achieving social change. The hub houses and fosters creative and community-driven projects for social change across Kenya, and is the first of its kind in Africa.
Judith Kanaitha is an investigative journalist and reporter based in Nairobi, Kenya. For several years, she has worked for Ghetto Radio, a station created to represent and campaign for the interests of the more than two million people that live in the slums of Nairobi. Judith specialises in stories concerning the rights of women and the protection of children living in the city’s slums.