Winners

Mark Doyle and Ed Butler worked together to cover the events of 28 September 2009 when government troops opened fire on unarmed crowds at a pro-democracy opposition rally at a football stadium in the Guinean capital, Conakry. One UN official described it as a “blood bath“. Mark travelled to Guinea on 19 October 2009 to find out what happened. The programme helped to highlight potential human rights abuses in Guinea. A United Nations Commission of Inquiry, established in October 2009, investigated the stadium killings. Their report recommended the prosecution of the persons held responsible. In May 2010, the United Nations Commission set up an office in Guinea to monitor human rights and subsequently set up a transitional government.

Mark Doyle joined the BBC in 1986 as a producer with Focus on Africa and spent many years in Africa as the BBC’s East Africa and West Africa correspondents. He covered the Rwandan genocide and wars in Burundi, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mark is now a BBC international development correspondent and travels widely in Africa, Asia and Latin America filing for BBC TV, radio and online.

Ed Butler has been a BBC producer and reporter for two decades. He has presented the BBC’s main news programmes and has reported widely in Europe and Africa, including recent documentaries on Ireland, Greece, Ethiopia and Gambia. He has worked with Mark on a number of occasions, including two documentary series: “The Aid Trap” about the failures of international aid policy (2005) in Africa, and “Feeding the World” (2007), which examined challenges facing the global food supply.