Neha Wadekar
February 15, 2023Articles
Thailand has long been one of the world’s major sex tourism destinations. Estimates of sex work’s contribution to GDP vary widely because the industry operates almost entirely underground. But in 2015, the black market research company Havocscope valued it at $6.4 billion per year—about 1.5 percent of the country’s GDP that year.
Despite earning billions annually, the industry is effectively illegal, controversial among Thais, and highly stigmatized. Now, the debate over sex work is spilling into public forums, with a progressive lawmaker introducing a bill in parliament to legalize it. Its proponents argue that criminalization has deprived sex workers of basic labor rights and protections enjoyed by other workers, making them more vulnerable to health risks, harassment, exploitation, and violence—while making sex work itself no less visible.
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November 10, 2022Radio
Neha Wadekar, Associate Producer of Kabul Falling, speaks with Rahman, a former acting general in the Afghan army, and Carly Sparkes, operations manager at Azadi Charity, about what it’s like to leave behind the only life you’ve ever known and resettle in a foreign country to rebuild anew.
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December 9, 2022Press
At the IACC 2022, I moderated the plenary entitled Fighting Greed, Kleptocracy, Oligarchs, Money Laundering and their Enablers. My intro starts at 24:15 in the video. The esteemed panelists did an amazing job, and the discussion got heated. Check out their perspectives by clicking on the link!
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December 19, 2022Articles
December 9th was International Anti-Corruption Day. Fuller Project contributor Neha Wadekar attended the International Anti-Corruption Conference (IACC), a gathering in Washington, D.C., that brought together heads of state, civil society, business leaders and investigative journalists.
The conference drew some of the world’s most prominent anti-corruption voices. Among them was Maria Pevchikh, Chief Investigator at the Anti-Corruption Foundation, a non-governmental organization founded by Alexei Navalny, the leading political rival of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Read our interview with Maria here.
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December 19, 2022Videos
December 9th was International Anti-Corruption Day. Fuller Project contributor Neha Wadekar attended the International Anti-Corruption Conference (IACC), a gathering in Washington, D.C., that brought together heads of state, civil society, business leaders and investigative journalists.
The conference drew some of the world’s most prominent anti-corruption voices. Among them was Maria Pevchikh, Chief Investigator at the Anti-Corruption Foundation, a non-governmental organization founded by Alexei Navalny, the leading political rival of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Watch our interview with Maria here.
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December 28, 2022Videos
In one of the world’s most popular sex tourism destinations, sex workers, nonprofit organizations and politicians are part of a growing movement to decriminalize the industry. It’s an attempt to help sex workers earn basic rights and protections. Special correspondent Neha Wadekar reports from Thailand.
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October 24, 2022Radio
Neha Wadekar, Associate Producer of Kabul Falling, speaks with two Afghan women on their ongoing work in media – and the extreme dangers journalists face as they continue to report under the Taliban’s regime.
In this exclusive audio interview, Rukshana Media founder Zahra Joya talks about setting up the women-focused publication, and shares her own story of escaping Afghanistan following the Taliban takeover. Shirin Yusofi, a Kabul-based journalist at Rukshana Media, shares her motivation for continuing to report from Kabul despite the risks – including terrifying close calls with Taliban enforcers.
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August 17, 2022Videos
Kenyans went to the polls last week in an election widely hailed as one of the most transparent and peaceful in the nation’s history, a major milestone for a country that has experienced significant post-election violence in past years. But the losing candidate, Raila Odinga, has refused to concede and he may challenge the results in court. I reported from Nairobi.
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August 9, 2022Videos
** With exclusive interviews with President Elect William Ruto and Raila Odinga **
Kenyans will go to the polls on Tuesday to select a new president. In a nation with a history of contested and violent elections, this is the first time a member of the politically dominant Kikuyu tribe is not running. And many claim this is Kenya’s first election in which class plays a greater role than ethnicity. My report with Jack Hewson.
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As Facebook and its competitor TikTok grow at breakneck speed in Kenya, and across Africa, researchers say the tech companies are failing to keep pace with a proliferation of terrorist content, hate speech and false information , taking advantage of poor regulatory frameworks to avoid stricter oversight.
“It’s a deliberate choice to maximize labor and profit extraction, because they view the societies in the Global South primarily as markets, not as societies,” said Nanjala Nyabola, a Kenyan technology and social researcher.
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