Three investigative journalists are being recognized with international awards for their courage and reporting.
Reporters John-Allan Namu from Kenya, Valeriya Yegoshyna from Ukraine and Rana Sabbagh from Jordan were in Washington this week for a ceremony highlighting their work.
Namu and Yegoshyna were honored with the ICFJ Knight International Journalism Award by the global media network, the International Center for Journalists, or ICFJ. Sabbagh was awarded the ICFJ Knight Trailblazer award.
“From corruption to war crimes, the outstanding journalism they have done has led to greater accountability and change,” ICFJ President Sharon Moshavi said in a statement.
For Sabbagh, the award is the most important one she’s received in her career.
As a co-founder of the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism and senior editor for the MENA region within the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Sabbagh has worked as a journalist for over 40 years in the Middle East.
She is known for her commitment to free speech and for producing accountability journalism, including on human rights and gender equality.
Sabbagh has faced numerous cyberattacks. In the past three years, her phone was infected six times by Pegasus, a surveillance software developed and marketed to governments by an Israeli company. The journalist’s career has also put her health and private life at risk.
She said that she and other journalists in the region are often victims of a “very rigid political system that is going to punish anybody.”
But, she said, reporting is her mission in life. Her mother taught her to always protect those who are weak, and this value has guided her journalism career.
“I feel like I give a voice to the voiceless, and I talk about people that are totally ignored, and I expose corruption that is eating at the root of our societies in the Middle East,” Sabbagh told VOA.
Sabbagh appreciates seeing the real-world effects of her reporting. Every time she publishes an investigation, she said, “something happens for the better.”
With the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism, she investigated neglect and abuse in privately run care homes for children with disabilities. After the piece was published, the Jordanian king visited the care homes and closed them, Sabbagh told VOA.
“It shows me that the 40 years of my life have not been in vain, that I was able to take big risks, sometimes at my own expense,” she said. “But in the process, it allowed me such a great possibility to meet people that I would have never met.”
Fellow awardee Namu also covers human rights abuses and corruption, including an investigation on bribery between city inspectors and criminal gangs in Kenya.
For Namu —co-creator and editorial director of Africa Uncensored — the award is about the body of work he’s created over a 20-year career.
Namu hopes his reporting can help dispel the notion that the “Global South” is disconnected from the rest of the world, he told VOA. He said stories that begin in Africa can have worldwide implications.
“There’s no [Global] North or South,” he told VOA. “People are just people, and the stories we tell should be interconnected and looked at in that way.”
Namu has faced numerous lawsuits for his work with Africa Uncensored, but he believes it is easier to be a reporter in Kenya, where the democracy is relatively more stable, than in some other countries on the continent.
One global trend he has seen, however, is how misinformation and disinformation in political conflicts creates a dangerous environment for reporters.
“Recently, there’s been a lot of coordinated inauthentic messaging and disinformation around me and my organization,” he told VOA.
False claims were circulated claiming Africa Uncensored received funding to cause social upheaval. That falsehood, he said, made the organization a target of the Kenyan public.
The other awardee, Ukrainian reporter Yegoshyna, also knows what it is like to be targeted.
A reporter for Schemes, an investigative project at VOA sister outlet RFE/RL, Yegoshyna was awarded for her “powerful, enterprising, clever and innovative” reporting, ICFJ judge Simon Robinson said in a statement.
“I’m so glad about this award,” Yegoshyna told VOA. “I’m also kind of proud because I’m the second Ukrainian who received this award.”
Yegoshyna reports from “de-occupied zones” — towns in Ukraine that border or are extremely close to Russian-controlled areas. There, she interviews attack survivors and digs through destroyed buildings.
Yegoshyna joined the team at Schemes before Russia’s full-scale invasion and focused primarily on anti-corruption reporting. But now her coverage includes investigating war crimes.
“When the invasion started, we didn’t know what to do, but we decided not to stop working for even a single day,” she told VOA.
The team members’ investigative reporting skills help them uncover and publicize information about occupied areas. Sometimes that involves details from calls between Russian soldiers and their relatives.
She and her team analyzed satellite images to uncover mass graves in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
Russia’s siege of the Ukrainian city left thousands dead and others displaced.
The work can often be dangerous. According to the ICFJ, reporters at Schemes have experienced wiretapping and online harassment as a result of their investigations.
But Yegoshyna said being an investigative journalist also allows her to show the world what is going on in Ukraine.
“It’s important to report in a war zone area because we’re fixing history, and we’re giving the truth to people who are living in Ukraine and outside Ukraine,” she told VOA. “History is going on right now.”
