Our Team

Yahaya Masahudu is an award-winning Ghanaian journalist based in the Northern Region. He has worked with a number of media organizations both locally and globally. He currently works as a freelance journalist and has several impactful stories to his credit.

His recent documentary with the BBC, released in March 2025 – India’s Opioid Kings exposed the manufacturers of harmful illegal opioids fueling a public health crisis in Ghana, Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire and other countries within the West African sub-region. The Indian government, following the release of the documentary, banned the production of tapentadol, carisoprodol combination pills in India, raided the manufacturing company and seized its entire stock.

Yahaya Masahudu also worked on a 2023 BBC Africa Eye documentary – The Night they Came for our Children. The documentary examined the raids conducted by one of the world’s leading anti-slavery nonprofits, International Justice Mission (IJM) to rescue trafficked children and bring them to safety. The investigation found that some of the raids, backed by IJM, resulted in some of the children wrongfully taken from their families in Ghana and their relatives wrongly prosecuted. In a secretly filmed conversation between BBC’s undercover reporter and a senior IJM staff member, the reporter was told that IJM staff needed to rescue a set number of victims and secure a set number of prosecutions each year, raising concerns of a target driven culture within the organization.

Masahudu has also reported on a wide range of issues in the areas of agriculture, health, child marriage, water and sanitation and climate change which produced tangible results in some communities in the Northern Region of Ghana.

Masahudu is also a fact-checker who has worked with leading Fact-checking organizations in Ghana including Fact Check Ghana (a project of the Media Foundation for West Africa), Dubawa Ghana, and the Ghana Fact-checking Coalition. He led a team of local journalists in December 2024 to monitor offline instances of mis/dis information arising due to the 2024 general elections in Ghana.

He is a media partner with the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana)’s I am Aware program where he works on accountability stories in the Sagnarigu Municipality. The feature stories highlight critical challenges facing the municipality and the interventions or lack thereof by the government and the municipal assembly. The project, which is funded by the Hewlett Foundation in the USA, also examines the promises made to the people and delivery or otherwise of those projects and policies.

He holds a master’s degree in Communication Studies from the University of Ghana and has been teaching part-time at the Institute of Business Management and Journalism (IBM&J). Tamale Learning Centre. Since 2019, he has been teaching classes in Newspaper Reporting, Broadcast Journalism, Development Journalism and Legal Environment of Journalism at the both Diploma and Higher National Diploma (HND) levels.

He won the Rural and Agricultural reporter of the year (in 2019) at the maiden Ghana Journalists Association Awards in the Northern Region. He was also the 2^nd Runner Up at the Harmattan Awards for Development Journalism for two consecutive times in 2018 and 2019.