World Of Secrets: Death in Dubai
BBC, September 2025
From Our Own Correspondent: Dubai’s hidden sex trade
BBC, October 2025
Audio
A woman falls from a tower block. It's caught on camera and the clip goes viral. Within hours, Mona Kizz’s name is trending worldwide. In death, the beautiful 23-year-old Ugandan is accused of being a #DubaiPortaPotty. With over 450 million views on TikTok, the hashtag leads to parodies and speculative exposés of women suspected of being paid by men to be their human toilet. But behind the online rumours lies an even darker reality.
Dubai is often described as one of the safest cities in the world - but safe for who? In the shadows of shining skyscrapers and shopping malls is an exploitative sex trade. Runako Celina has been investigating the suspicious deaths of two women who travelled to Dubai with big dreams.
About:
Runako is a regular contributor to From Our Own Correspondent (FOOC), the BBC’s long-running radio programme where reporters around the world share vivid, first-hand reflections on global events and everyday stories.
Presented by Kate Adie and Pascale Harter, FOOC airs on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service, reaching a global audience of more than 300 million listeners each week.
BBC, December 2024
China's Xinjiang province is home to a huge tomato industry, which has been linked to forced labour - an allegation China denies. Still, many Uyghurs and ethnic Kazakhs have fled Xinjiang into neighbouring Kazakhstan, where Runako Celina met one woman who revealed the realitles of life in the region.
Pull the Thread: The Wild Life
Luminary, May 2024
Executive-produced by Drake, Adel “Future” Nur, Peter Nelson, and Maggie Gilbride of DreamCrew season one of Pull The Thread—The Wild Life—goes inside the international undercover operation to take down notorious wildlife trafficker, Moazu Kromah, while illuminating the dark and tangled web of the illegal wildlife trade. The eight-part series is hosted by the UK-based, award-winning investigative journalist Runako Celina, known for her hard-hitting documentary “Racism for Sale.”
BBC Radio 4, July 2022
We track down a Chinese film maker in Malawi who used local children to film personalised greeting videos, some of which included racist content. These videos were sold on Chinese media and internet platforms – with the communities in Malawi none the wiser about the purpose of the content. Runako Celina reflects on how the attitudes she encountered on this investigation were reminiscent of her own experience as a black woman living in Beijing.
Each episode, The Black Livity China Podcast brings together lesser-heard voices, to give you real, on-the-ground insights humanising the topics at the heart of the Africa-China and wider Black diaspora-China headlines. Through personal anecdotes and community insights, we document and demystify African and Afro-diasporic experiences both in China and in relation to China, adding a much-needed human element to the Africa-China, Black-China story.
