New documentary digs into the shadow scholar industry

Essay mills may have been outlawed by some governments, including in Australia and the United Kingdom, but that has not stopped a booming industry from ‘employing’ an estimated 40,000 bright young Kenyans in the country’s capital, Nairobi, who rely on academic contract cheating to survive and pay essential bills.

Recent research investigating the shadowy essay-writing industry from an African perspective, rather than from the Global North, has been turned into an award-winning documentary film.

The research in The Shadow Scholars documentary comes from Patricia Kingori, a British Kenyan sociologist and the University of Oxford’s youngest black female professor in its 925-year history.

Now Professor of Global Health Ethics at Oxford’s Population Health Ethox Centre, Kingori travelled to Nairobi with filmmakers to explore the exploitative global relations between students struggling academically in the Global North, who are increasingly relying on more talented students and unemployed graduates in Global South countries, such as Kenya, to ghost write their academic assignments.

In the documentary, Kingori sought out and interviewed many of the brilliant young ‘contract writers’, who can turn around a masters essay overnight for little more than US$100 in a subject they may have barely studied before.

Millions used essay mills

She wanted to understand their motivations and the questionable power dynamics of the essay mills which, according to one estimate, may have been used by 37 million students globally, primarily in the United States, UK and Australia.

Kingori, who spent her first three years in Kenya, before moving, first, to St Kitts in the Caribbean and then to the UK, calls the contract writers ‘shadow scholars’ because they are invisible most of the time and often hide their real identities by using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to appear to be from the Global North.

“We use white names because it convinces the cheats that we are well able to complete the task,” says one of the Kenyan ghostwriters in the film, who explains that the Western stereotype of African students and academics might put off their customers in the Global North from using the service.

Kingori says: “Power makes itself invisible, so we don’t question whether things should be the way they are.

“This film, based on my research, investigates the global structures that allow an industry of brilliant young Kenyans, who cannot get other work, to support others who buy their degrees rather than doing their own work.

“It enrages me! This should not be why Kenya is on the map, and if the world was fair, these scholars would be able to operate on the world stage as themselves.”

Degrees can be bought

The film questions the true value of academic qualifications in a world where degrees can be bought and suggests there may be as many 50,000 highly educated Kenyans earning their living by writing academic papers for less able students in the Global North, with most of the shadow scholars based in Nairobi, which has become an ‘online labour’ hot spot.

The Shadow Scholars is currently doing a short tour of cinemas in London, Oxford and Leeds and will be screened on Channel 4 television in the UK on 24 September 2025. The names of the contract essay-writers have been changed and their identities disguised in the interviews in the film using artificial intelligence.

Exploitative global relations

Rachel Brooks, Professor of Higher Education at the University of Oxford and the president of the British Sociological Association, told University World News: “The film provides appalling evidence of highly exploitative global relations.”

Brooks said: “Although staff in the UK and elsewhere have been aware of the existence of essay mills for some time, the scale of the activity revealed in this film is shocking.”

She suggested that “the pervasiveness of Generative AI may help bring such practices to an end – with lecturers now thinking more creatively about the assessments they set, to ensure the work students submit is their own”.

However, IT experts are not so sure that AI will spell the end to the contract essays, despite acknowledging that some students have moved to using GenAI systems like ChatGPT to write their assignments.

Dr Thomas Lancaster, a computer scientist and expert on contract cheating at Imperial College London, said he is aware of a new market for students who use GenAI to create a first draft, but then hire a writer to check the content and to rewrite it so that it is not detected as AI generated.

Warning to Global North students

The film shows Lancaster warning Global North students that, once they have given their name, e-mail address and credit card details, and maybe even agreed to send copies of their ID, the essay mill owners may keep demanding payments with the threat of exposing the cheats to their university.

The film also interviewed one of the Kenyan contract essay-writers who has been in touch with the International Labour Organisation to try to set up a union to represent the writers to get a better share of the money paid for the fake essays. Many of the contract writers only get a third of what clients in the Global North pay for the fake essays.

Most of the Kenyans involved in the industry don’t see anything wrong with what they are doing to earn a living and say the ethical questions should be directed to students in the US, UK and Australia who are paying for these services.

Kingori and the filmmakers leave audiences pondering just how many students from top universities in the West who have graduated with flying colours and are now doctors, engineers, pilots, nurses or whatever, used the contract cheating services – and how many of these ‘graduates’ may now be at the mercy of the essay mills if they stop paying.

It is a dangerous game, but about 37 million students have benefited from the shadow scholars’ services, according to an estimate by Professor Phil Newton, an expert in education fraud at Swansea University in Wales, whose research is mentioned in the film.

Clampdowns on advertisers

Efforts to clamp down on the essay mills have included specific legislation in the United Kingdom to crack down on internet service platforms advertising contract cheating services, such as a move adopted by the last Conservative government in 2022. Pay Pal has also restricted payments to known cheating services, but these are often disguised as research centres or the like.

Australia has also attempted to block access to websites offering contract cheating, but the business is still flourishing in Kenya and elsewhere.

The Shadow Scholars documentary has already been screened at 20 festivals, including BFI London Film Festival, where it had its world premiere in the Best Documentary Feature competition and was also awarded a Special Jury Mention in 2024. It also won Best Documentary Special Jury Mention at the Johannesburg Film Festival. It will also be screened at the Nairobi Film Festival from 16-26 October.

The film was directed by Eloïse King and Sir Steve McQueen is the executive producer.