Tracing a Timber Route Through Three Borders

It began with a single manifest, photographed on a reporter's phone at a checkpoint outside Akure. Nothing about it looked unusual — a routine shipment, a familiar stamp, a driver waiting in the heat. It was only when a partner newsroom two countries away noticed a matching entry in their own customs records that the shape of something larger came into view.

Over the following weeks, three newsrooms worked the same question from three directions. One followed the paperwork forward from the point of loading. Another traced it backward from the port of arrival. A third sat with forestry officials and community elders near the felling site itself, asking what the documents didn't say. None of the three had the whole picture alone, and none pretended to.

Where the paper trail thinned

The hardest stretch of the investigation wasn't the reporting itself but agreeing on what counted as confirmed. A permit number that appeared valid in one country's registry returned no match in the next. Rather than assume the worst, the team spent a full week simply reconciling formats — some records used a regional code, others a national one, and the mismatch alone explained several apparent gaps that had nothing to do with wrongdoing.

"We nearly published two weeks earlier than we did. The extra time was spent making sure a clerical difference wasn't mistaken for a missing shipment."

That patience paid off. By the time the three newsrooms compared final drafts, the discrepancies that remained were the ones that mattered — routes that didn't correspond to any recorded felling permit, and volumes that grew unexplained between one checkpoint and the next.

What the ledger recorded

When the piece published, the contribution ledger accompanying it named each partner's role plainly: field verification from the Nigerian team, customs analysis from the Ghanaian partner, and community interviews from the Malian newsroom. No single outlet's name led the byline; the ledger did that work instead, in a format readers could check for themselves.

Readers who followed the project through Montrex's project access plan could see the full ledger alongside the published piece, along with the methodology panel explaining how document mismatches were resolved. That transparency, more than any single revelation in the story, is what several partner newsrooms said they were proudest of.