Journalist, Kiki Mordi’s Sex For Grades documentary has been nominated for an Emmy award in Current Affairs category.
The 29-year-old BBC reporter exposed the rot in West African universities when she went undercover to a number of tertiary institutions in Nigeria and Ghana in 2019.
Through BBC Africa Eye, the journalist fished out lecturers who were in the habit of demanding sexual intercourse from students in exchange for good grades or to gain admission into the institution.
To get the stories of sexual harassment out, Mordi and her team spoke to various lecturers and students while armed with body or spy cameras.
In one of the cases uncovered, Professor Boniface Igbeneghu, a Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Arts; and a former Sub Dean of the University of Lagos (Unilag), was seen trying to sexually harass one of the reporters who posed as a 17-year-old student.
The documentary, after its release in October 2019, sparked outrage across various social media platforms as many Nigerians including top politicians called on the Federal Government to take immediate action against sexual harassment in Nigerian Universities.
Read Also: SexForGrades: What Nigerians On Social Media Are Saying
The call prompted the Senate to re-introduce the anti-sexual harassment bill in October 2019.
On July 7 2020, the Senate then passed a bill on sexual harassment that seeks to ‘protect students against sexual harassment’ as well as ‘prevent sexual harassment of students by educators in tertiary institutions.’
Read Also: Senate Passes Bill Against Sexual Harassment In Tertiary Institutions
Mordi has since received recognition for her work within and outside Nigeria and the documentary has also just earned her an Emmy nomination in the Current Affairs category.
Sharing the news on Twitter, Mordi wrote;
Here’s me, despite being an emotional mess, announcing that @BBCAfrica #BBCAfricaEye‘s #SexForGrades is nominated in the “Current Affairs” category for this year’s international Emmys.
Every single soul that made this project come alive deserves this honor! https://t.co/KemqXtZAYl— Kiki Mordi (@kikimordi) August 18, 2020
The 8 nominees span 6 countries: Brazil, Nigeria, Qatar, Russia, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
Other nominees in News and Current Affairs category are: Channel 4 News: Hong Kong – A Year of Living Dangerously, RJ2: Ghost Staff TV Globo, Russian Jet Crash-Landing in Moscow: Timeline and Survivors, The Battle for Burkina Faso, GloboNews Documentário: Allies (GloboNews Documentaries), Swedbank och Penningtvätten: Dirty Banking (The Story of Swedbank and the World’s Largest Money Laundering Scandal) and Undercover: Inside China’s Digital Gulag.
The International Emmy winners will be recognized during an online ceremony on September 21.
