In Kenya, there exists a group of people called "shadow scholars”, who are highly educated young men and women who have turned academic ghostwriting into a global industry, making their country the famous capital for essay cheating.
The scale of the operation is staggering. Estimates suggest that approximately 37 million students worldwide have used essay-writing services, with a significant proportion of the work produced in Kenya. In Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, an estimated 40,000 highly educated Kenyans (these are only the formal writers who agree to register themselves) earn their living by ghostwriting academic papers for students in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. A Facebook group for academic writers in Kenya includes over 50,000 members, and researchers have found that the majority of ghostwriters for international contract cheating companies are based in this country. The industry has grown so pervasive that virtually every apartment building in Nairobi, two or three writers can be found working at any given hour.
The writers adopt western pseudonyms and create fake online profiles to disguise their Kenyan origins, this is driven by the knowledge that clients in Europe are more likely to trust a "British" or "American" writer. The work they produce incorporates an extraordinary range of subjects, from nursing and engineering to quantum physics and literature. This is delivered with a great speed and efficiency that has astonished researchers. Patricia Kingori, the Oxford professor whose 2025 documentary “The Shadow Scholars” brought this hidden sector to international attention, she is astonished by the efficiency and productivity of the workers, who could produce a high-quality essay in as little as 6 hours.
In a country where youth unemployment is about 35 percent, even the lowest income tier of academic writing offers a financial lifeline that no other sector can match. "We are jobless. We have graduated but are still unemployed. That's where academic writing comes in," one writer told a Kenyan news outlet.
Moreover, the human cost of this arrangement is profound. Writers described that they need to endure grueling 12-hour overnight shifts, working to deadlines so jammed that, as Kingori observed, "they don't get extensions or sicknotes. They just have to do it." Meanwhile, the students who purchase their work graduate from excellent schools and secure jobs that the Kenyan writers, despite their academic capability, are excluded from.
International regulators have attempted to intervene. The United Kingdom formally banned contract cheating services in 2022, and Australia has pursued similar measures. Yet the industry has proved remarkably resilient. As one expert noted, some students now use generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini to produce first drafts and then hire Kenyan writers to refine the content and evade AI detection, creating a new combination form of academic cheating that existing regulations were not designed to address. The writers themselves express a deep internal conflict about their work. Feeling pride in their intellectual labor, but shame at its invisibility in law, and a growing fear that the same AI technologies now supplementing their industry may make them become obsolete.
Source: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/shadow-scholars-inside-essay-mills-serving-students