Naipanoi Lepapa: How Digital Media Helped Kenyan Journalist Bag Lucrative Award

The terms ‘digital media’ and ‘freelance journalist’ were unheard of a long time ago. If anything, many veterans in the media industry had and still don’t yet see how digital media is transforming the world of journalism as we know it.

These days not many people wait until the 7 pm or 9 pm news on TV and radio to stay up to date on breaking news and current affairs, they get them on the spot…or as we like to call it these days, in ‘real time’. With the rise in digital journalism, blogs, news websites and digital native media houses have been on the sharp rise.

The reason we have these days media professionals leaving mainstream media houses to begin their independent digital media platforms is just the word, ‘independent’. You might have been told that some stories don’t make it to mainstream media platforms because they are censored and edited to hide vital information on people and organisations among others out of fear of repercussions from powerful people and advertisers.

This drive to have the truth out there is what inspired award-winning journalist and 2023 Pulitzer AI Accountability fellow, Naipanoi Lepapa, to release an expose titled Hard Labor: The Surrogacy Industry in Kenya, a two-part explosive investigative series that dug into the unregulated surrogacy market in Kenya.

She highlighted how agencies registered abroad were recruiting vulnerable women from low-income areas and marketing them as surrogates to international clients. She also uncovered a wide range of illegal activities including how the women were coerced, exploited and intimidated. 

Lepapa’s investigation inspired the project ‘The Baby Broker Project: Inside the World’s Leading Low-cost surrogacy agency’ via Finance Uncovered on a surrogacy tourism agency across four continents that matches desperate would-be parents with surrogates from poor economic backgrounds. 

On May 4, 2022, Lepapa's feature saw her win Journalist of the Year in the Annual Journalism Excellence Awards (AJEA) by the Media Council of Kenya (MCK), arguably one of the biggest awards in Kenyan journalism. Notable past winners included John-Allan Namu, Dennis Okari, Sharon Momanyi and Waihiga Mwaura.

Being a freelance journalist and working for a not-so-familiar digital publication, The Elephant, no one would have expected her to beat mainstream journalists – including Purity Mwambia of Citizen TV who came second – who are usually supported by huge state-of-the-art media tools and huge budgets. Peris Gachahi of Africa Uncensored (now at Code For Africa) came in third position.

"People ask me why I choose to work with publications such as The Elephant, for instance. I have a story that is coming out soon and someone I interviewed asked me why I was not taking such a good story to the mainstream media. It's hard for people to understand why.

"But it is because I know I’ll be protected. As long as I have the evidence, they will not leave me there to burn. So as a freelance journalist, I want to work with someone who I know will have my back completely, no matter what happens," she explained to Reuters Institute earlier this year regarding her choice of digital media to publish her feature.

Lepapa also revealed that she was aware that digital media outlets would not censor what she exposed, given how some editors would usually kill a story or omit important information as it compromises the identity of the person or organisation they wouldn't want to expose.

"So I would rather work with organisations such as Africa Uncensored and The Elephant because I know they are not going to take something out of my work because they're afraid of advertisers or afraid of some powerful people. They want the truth to be out there," she went on.

Lepapa celebrated the power of digital media owing to the connectedness it contributes to the wider community, given that anyone can access news and multimedia content even in the most remote of areas, as long as they can connect to the internet.

"This is fantastic because people can like and share your posts. The most beautiful thing for me about digital media is that it allows a fusion of text, audio, video and photographs, and the audience can also give you feedback in real time," she added.

For freelance journalists, she noted, the internet has created an opportunity, with alternative outlets where a journalist can have their investigations published. Also, one can publish an important story through a blog, on social media or independent media looking for well-done stories, as an alternative to publishing through mainstream media channels.

Other than clinching the Journalist of the Year award in 2022, Lepapa had been shortlisted at the prestigious Fetisov Journalism 2021 Awards in the Outstanding Investigative Category and at the People Journalism Prize for Africa (PJPA) 2021 Awards.

She started her journalism career in June 2015 as an intern after graduating from East Africa School of Media Studies. She worked as a news reporter and feature writer at The Sun Weekly newspaper and a reporter for the African Exponent before she embarked on her present career as a freelance investigative and feature journalist.

Lepapa dove into investigative journalism in 2019 when she was looking into a story on surrogacy and ran into reports that stated that infertility in Kenya was high.

Naipanoi Lepapa poses for a photo in a Manchester United jersey on March 6, 2023. /NAIPANOI LEPAPA

"I wanted to do a story on it as I am so passionate about gender issues. I wanted to do a story about that and just highlight surrogacy as an opportunity for many people or couples who can't have children the natural way," she narrated.

"At the time I was an intern at a weekly newspaper. I started my research and found several foreign websites dealing with surrogacy in Kenya. They all had foreign telephone numbers that were unreachable, and they could only be contacted through emails. This was very weird for me. I started looking at the agencies and concluded that there must be a scandal behind it. But at the time I did not think of doing an investigative piece because I didn't know how to do that. So I left it at that."

Lepapa has covered wide-ranging topics and issues, including politics, education, governance and development, health, food security, agriculture, environment, climate change, gender, technology, business and finance, culture, arts, and entertainment.

She also specializes in open-source intelligence and cross-border financial investigations to trace the illicit money flows and links between abusers of power and their networks or family members. 

Outside her journalism career, she works out a lot and is an ardent Manchester United fan.