within Kenya’s multi-billion dollar fake essay industry

Four years ago, at just 28 years old, Patricia Kingori became one of the youngest women and the youngest black person to be awarded a full professorship at the University of Oxford in Great Britain. Her research as a sociologist is focused on understanding, researching and documenting different forms of ethics and power in healthcare, medicine and science.

Her latest project, Scholars from the shadowsIt is a 138-minute documentary directed by Eloise King and executive produced 12 years of slavery directed by Steve McQueen. It investigates a hidden multi-billion dollar industry: contract cheating. Kingori follows how students in rich, industrialized countries of the Global North entrust their courses to “shadow scientists” in Nairobi. An estimated 40,000 highly educated but underemployed young people write everything from undergraduate essays to master’s theses and doctoral theses, often producing several essays each day under tight deadlines. Kenya, where Kingori conducted her doctoral research until political unrest forced her and her family to leave in 2007, is at the center of this global market. Surveys suggest that more than 70% of its online freelance workforce is engaged in ‘writing and translation’, which Kingori found to be a sneaky way of labeling fake essay writing.

This is not a new phenomenon: a 2018 survey estimated that at least one in seven graduates worldwide used such services¹. The governments of the United Kingdom, Ireland and Australia, and some American and Indian states, have taken steps to ban the advertising of commercial ‘essay mills’. But despite such moves, demand continues to grow. Kingori’s film explores the problem by addressing the writers themselves.

In the documentary, Kingori also talks about her personal experience when someone else took credit for her work. In sharing her story, she acknowledges that Kenyan ghostwriters are just one small part of “a much larger, systemic problem about the value of ideas, the value of people, where knowledge comes from, who is invited into spaces, who is removed.”

How was your path to the academic community?

I grew up as a teenager in a single-parent household in West London, after moving around a lot when I was younger, and I was always really interested in how the world worked. I stumbled upon sociology and loved it, because it takes the ordinary and shows how extraordinary it really is, holding a mirror up to us as a society.

I have a BA and MA from Royal Holloway, University of London. The latter was in medical sociology, investigating how social factors shape health and disease. I then worked as a research assistant for several years before starting my Ph.D.

Towards the end of my PhD, I met Michael Parker, Director of the Bioethics Ethox Center at the University of Oxford, at a conference. He was very supportive and encouraged me to stay in the academic community, at a time when I was ready to leave.

How did you become interested in the work of shadow scientists in Kenya?

In 2019, I went to an open meeting at the Oxford Internet Institute, a multidisciplinary department that researches digital technologies. The topic was the iLabour project, which investigates how people use the Internet for work. Kenya was listed as a hot spot for ‘writing and translation’, which turned out to be a euphemism for the fake essay industry. I have a Kenyan background and at the time I was working on fakes and fabrications – my research on data fabrication in clinical trials sparked an interest in fakes in general – so I was intrigued. The Online Labor Index, an economic indicator produced by the Oxford Internet Institute, had many numbers but little information about the people behind them.

Was it difficult to get the shadow scholars to talk to you?

Not at all. They won a few championships. They wanted the world to know that they exist, because they are proud of their work, even if it is undeserved. Many said they liked seeing their writing used in real dissertations and articles (often for prestigious institutions), even under someone else’s name. The challenge was not to persuade them to talk, but to decide whose stories to include.

What was your biggest surprise in this work?

The way power makes some people invisible and how long it lasts. In the course of our research, we came into contact with Anne Manuel, now retired librarian at Somerville College, University of Oxford. She recalled an oral history about Patricia Owtram, a Somerville student in the 1950s, now 102 years old. Owtram’s BLitt thesis was retrieved in 1959 and published under her mentor’s name in a scholarly publication, but in 2023 Somerville College managed to return it to her with her name. Shadow scientists have always existed: women, migrants, others excluded from the mainstream academic community.

What also surprised me was how prejudices shape assumptions. Tell people that a quarter of the class used a shadow scholar and almost everyone will make an incorrect assumption about who cheated.

What can we learn from the shadow scholars?

They can teach us a lot about dealing with pressure, deadlines and writer’s block — the same way we look for lessons in sports psychology.

We can learn a lot about how misconceptions and biases shape our understanding of expertise. When people actually accept that contract cheating exists, they imagine that it’s unemployed academics in the UK or the US who write the articles. I can’t imagine that there are actually young, bright Africans in Kenya who may never have left the country and yet have the skills to write a Ph.D. Their contribution is real, but long-standing assumptions about where knowledge is produced make it almost invisible.

What do you think this says about higher education in the Global North and Global South?

One of the things that really surprised me was the empathy that Kenyan writers had for students in the Global North. I thought they might say, “Oh, you lazy so-and-so,” but really they felt we’d all been sold the same broken social contract: work hard, study hard, and everything will be yours. But that dream did not come true.

Especially in the United States – which accounts for most of the work of essay writers – students manage massive debt, work alongside their studies and scramble for internships just to stay afloat. In Kenya, visa restrictions for travel to places like the UK and Australia, coupled with low wages, make it difficult to leave the country, so education is no longer seen as a passport to a successful future.

What are the biggest obstacles in solving contract fraud?