Inside the world of Kenya’s ‘shadow scholars’ paid to write essays for UK students | Universities

There is a secret industry that generates billions of dollars a year. Its workers are bright, industrious and completely anonymous. Their job is writing essays to order for students – in the UK and elsewhere – to help them get good degrees.

These are “shadow scholars”, highly educated Kenyans who earn a living by working for essay mills. They are contracted to ghostwrite essays, PhD dissertations and other academic papers for students across the world, who pay a fee then pass off the work as their own.

The role is not unique to Kenya. There are similar writers in India, Pakistan and any other number of countries, including the UK, but Kenya has been identified as a hotspot, with an estimated 40,000 ghostwriters working in Nairobi alone.

They are the subject of a new film that talks for the first time to the young Kenyans who may be writing an essay or dissertation on any topic from mechanical engineering, nursing or quantum physics to Jane Austen, linguistics or Ho Chi Minh.

Smart, ambitious, well-educated and tech-savvy, they worked hard to get to university, they graduated with good degrees, but there are no jobs. Instead they spend their days – and nights – logging on to essay-writing platforms, scrolling down the list of assignments and making their bids to win the work.

The cameras follow the sociologist and Oxford professor Patricia Kingori as she travels to Nairobi to interview the writers and explore the power dynamics that enable students in countries such as the UK to secure degrees and begin lucrative careers without doing their own work.

She is bowled over by the young people she meets. “They’re incredible,” she told the Guardian. “I felt like I was entering a kind of elite athletes’ camp. It’s like being a recreational jogger and then suddenly entering an Olympic village.

“You’re able to write an essay, on a subject you’ve learned nothing about, in six hours? How are you able to do this? They have to meet these deadlines, otherwise they get badly reviewed and they get kicked off the platform. They don’t get extensions. They don’t get sick notes. They just have to do it.”

Kingori, who is Kenyan-born, meets Mercy, a graduate and mother of Angel, who works through the night, sometimes having to master two different subjects for two different assignments in the space of 12 hours. She has had only three hours’ sleep, but she needs the money.

With the money he has made, Chege, who describes himself as one of Kenya’s academic writing pioneers, paid for his own education, supported his sister through her degree, built his parents a house and bought himself a car.

The writers create fake IDs, using white profiles and names, because they say it helps convince clients they are up to the task. “If you go online now and try to find help with an…