Raquel Carvalho is an independent journalist who has worked across Asia for over 15 years – with short stints in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Her latest stories have focused on migration, human trafficking, labour, women’s rights, security, and conflict. She is one of the two 2025 International Women’s Media Foundation’s Kim Wall Memorial Fund awardees.

Raquel has contributed to several global news outlets, including TIME, The Telegraph, and Al Jazeera English, among others. She is a former Asia Correspondent at the South China Morning Post, where she previously worked as a reporter on the Hong Kong desk.

A long-form piece she wrote for TIME on Indonesian women who joined ISIS has been shortlisted for the 2025 Fetisov Journalism Awards in the Outstanding Contribution to Peace category.

In 2023, she was the recipient of the inaugural Women’s Stories in the Spotlight prize about war and peace in Southeast Asia, launched by the Global Network of Women Peacebuilders and UN Women.

Raquel has led a host of multimedia investigations and cross-border collaborations.

She was the project leader and author of a series of stories that exposed the exploitation of Filipino migrant workers seeking jobs in Poland, which received support from the Journalism Fund’s Modern Slavery Unveiled Grant.

Raquel has written extensively about the plight of migrant workers, refugees, and other marginalised groups. Her reporting has been highlighted by the International Labour Organization’s Global Media Competition Anthology on Migrant Domestic Workers. She has broken stories on wrongful dismissals, mistreatment, and death of migrant workers from countries such as the Philippines and Indonesia. At the same time, Raquel has exposed unscrupulous employment agencies as well as money lenders that push migrants into debt traps.

In 2018, she received a grant from the US State Department to report on human trafficking issues from Washington DC, Houston, and Los Angeles. Raquel has been distinguished with other accolades, including the 2021 World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) Asian Media Silver Award in the category of Best Feature for an in-depth story about bride trafficking.

A highlight of her long-form work is a multimedia project about drug mules from Latin America in Hong Kong and the criminal networks behind them, which was a finalist at the 2019 SOPA Awards.

She also led an international cross-border collaboration between five news outlets focused on image-based abuse and sex digital crimes in Asia. The project received a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute.

For a three-part series on Chinese investment in Latin America, Raquel conducted on-the-ground interviews with local communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon and the Andes, where she investigated the social and environmental impacts of Chinese-run mines. Raquel produced a multimedia project that combined long-form articles with photos and videos she shot during the trip.

Raquel has written numerous scoops of global significance, including exclusive stories about the North Korean community in Macau and the asylum seekers who sheltered the American whistleblower Edward Snowden in Hong Kong.

She was part of the SCMP’s online team covering Occupy Central in Hong Kong in 2014, which won a Human Rights Press Award. In 2019, Raquel was back on the frontlines of the protests in Hong Kong. During that time, she wrote a series of long-form pieces, two of which were featured in the book Rebel City published in 2020.

Raquel has been a moderator, guest lecturer, and speaker at the ASEAN Women, Peace and Security Summit; the Asia Region Anti-Trafficking Conference; the Hong Kong Literary Festival, and other events.

Reach out by email at raquelcarvalhojourno(at)proton(dot)me