Two lawyers from Kenya and the UK have spent years tracking down British soldiers who abandoned the children they fathered with Kenyan women while stationed in Nanyuki, Kenya.

Kenya-based human rights lawyer Kelvin Kubai grew up near Nanyuki and witnessed firsthand the struggles of the mothers and children, who were sometimes ostracised by their communities due to their parentage. After qualifying as a lawyer, he was determined to get justice for these abandoned families, and began working with James Netto, an international children’s rights lawyer based in the UK, and geneticist Professor Denise Syndercombe Court from King's College London.

Using commercially-available DNA ancestry databases, Professor Syndercombe Court began matching genetic markers from the DNA of the children with distant relatives of the men who turned out to be the biological fathers in question. Prior to these discoveries, some of the children and their families believed that the soldiers had died in Afghanistan, often dealing with the complicated nature of grief for a man you never knew, while also facing financial hardship and even social exclusion.