About
Neha Wadekar is an American multimedia journalist based between Nairobi and London. Her reporting focuses on gender, climate, conflict, and systemic injustice, predominantly across Africa. Her award-winning work has been published by The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Economist, CNN, PBS NewsHour, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.
She has received fellowships and support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the International Women's Media Foundation, the Overseas Press Club, the United Nations Foundation, Type Investigations, the Fuller Project, the GroundTruth Project, and Journalists for Transparency.
Neha began reporting overseas in 2016, covering the Syrian refugee crisis from neighboring Jordan. Later that year, an Overseas Press Club Fellowship with the Reuters bureau in Nairobi brought her to Kenya. In 2017 and 2022 she documented Kenya's contentious national elections, focusing on disinformation, ethnic violence, and youth political engagement. In 2017, she also covered the devastating effects of prolonged drought in the Horn of Africa.
In 2018, she reported on the humanitarian fallout from the war in Yemen, focusing on the largely overlooked impact of conflict on women and children.
In 2019, Neha investigated how the American Christian Far Right influenced President Donald J.Trump's administration to roll back abortion rights in Kenya, leading to an increase in maternal deaths from unsafe backally abortion procedures. She continues to document the influence of U.S. evangelicals on African human rights issues.
In 2020, Neha reported extensively on Covid19 from Kenya, focusing on the proliferation of vaccine misinformation in Africa, as well as the impact of the pandemic on African supply chains, abortion access across the continent, and female genital cutting rates in northern Kenya.
Her 2021 reporting for PBS NewsHour about the drivers of an Islamist insurgency in northern Mozambique earned her the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting's Breakthrough Journalism Award. That year, she also served as East Africa contributor to The Wall Street Journal's “Facebook Files,” a groundbreaking investigative series that revealed harms associated with Facebook, including how the company failed to contain hate speech and incitement in non-Western countries. The series won several journalism awards.
In 2022 and 2023, Neha worked with a colleague and team of editors at The Intercept to investigate Bridge International Academies, a chain of for profit, private schools catering to low-income students in Africa and India. Their reporting exposed child sexual abuse in the privatized education sector, sparking global attention and leading to intense scrutiny within the World Bank and other Bridge funders.
In 2023 and 2024, Neha co-led an investigation into environmental and public health violations at Rio Tinto's ilmenite mine in Madagascar. The investigation was co-published by The Intercept and The Guardian and uncovered contamination of local waterways with heavy metals including uranium and lead. The investigation was shortlisted for the True Story Award.
In 2024, Neha reported and produced two segments for PBS NewsHour from eastern Chad, including one about the use of widespread sexual violence as a weapon of war in Sudan's ongoing conflict. The segments brought the situation in Sudan — widely regarded as the world's worst humanitarian crisis — to the television screens of many American viewers who knew little about the country's war. That October, she also reported and produced a segment for PBS NewsHour on how the upcoming 2024 U.S. election would affect abortion access for Kenyan women and girls.
Neha grew up in the Boston area and attended Milton Academy. She earned her undergraduate degree from Tufts University and completed a Master's degree at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where she was an Annenberg Fellow and received the Penny Lernoux Award for International Reporting and the Order of Arete Award.