Supported projects

BRUSSELS - Everywhere people are on the move. In search of a better life. Europe is bursting at the seams with new citizens. The old continent is struggling with the immigration phenomenon; and handling it with amazing ineptitude. The question is not: who is welcome and who is not? The question has ...

KINSHASA - More then a hundred years after the publication of Joseph Conrads’ book ’The Heart of Darkness”. Marc Hoogsteyns checks if the situation in Congo has changed. Despite all the trouble the author remarks that there is still hope for this country.

KINSHASA - In July 2009, the American magazine Foreign Policy published its annual list of failed nation-states. The Democratic Republic of Congo occupied fifth place, after notoriously dysfunctional states like Somalia, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and Chad, and ahead of war-torn countries like Iraq and ...

TALLINN - According to experts, Estonian financial institutions are popular among criminals for laundering money because Estonia offers cheaper currency transactions than Russia and less regulation than in the EU. Its convenient location for such transactions adds to the appeal.

BRUSSELS - Due to the banking crisis the Belgian government had to bail out 4 major financial institutions in 2008 and 2009 to prevent them from bankruptcy. Fortis, KBC, Dexia and Ethias initially received more than 20 billion of tax payers' money which they will have to reimburse eventually. But ...

GABORONE - Ask any average Belgian, or any European for that matter, to name three words he associates with sub-Saharan Africa. The odds are big he will come up with for instance ‘war’, ‘hunger’ and ‘rape’.

ROTTERDAM - A taboo-breaking story about the hidden problem of incest in immigrant families in the Netherlands.

NOVOSIBIRSK - Debby Huysmans shows a photographic research on forgotten and isolated communities in Siberia. The two longest rivers of Siberia, the Yenisey and Lena, guided the photographer through the desolated area in search of individuals who experience this area as their biotope and the marks ...

BUCHAREST - 'The New Slave Trade in the Heart of Europe': poor people are being lured from Eastern Europe to the Czech Republic for forced labour. Some of the worst gangsters are now on trial but there is no sign of this evil trade coming to an end.

MUMBAI - With financial support from the Fonds Pascal Decroos, Nick Meynen followed carbon credit money flowing from Belgium to India, where he discovered a desert full of mirages. Part from the fraud and abuse, he also noticed the difference in approach between Flanders and Belgium, the buyers of ...

TARINKOT - How does a man with only a motorbike, a satellite phone and a small group of confidants become President of Afghanistan? In Expedition Uruzgan, Bette Dam reveals how Hamid Karzai liberated the province of Uruzgan from the Taliban after 11 September 2001. This was a crucial moment in ...

SALÉ - On 27 July, Abdelkader Belliraj was sentenced to life imprisonment by the court in Salé. The Moroccan judicial authorities found that Belliraj had committed six murders in Belgium, smuggled weapons into Morocco, laundered money, and led a terrorist network.

BUDAPEST - One year ago, the Belgian government purchased two million tonnes of CO₂ emission rights from Hungary. This €26 million investment is intended to help the country meet its obligations under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce emissions by 7.5 per cent by 2012 compared to 1990 levels.

BAMAKO - The river Niger, Mali's vein of life, is in danger. Photographer Raymond Dakoua shows the great economic, social, human and ecological importance of Africa's third longest river. 'Le Djoliba' means 'the river' in the Bambara language.

DUBAI – Thanks to its strategic location, booming real estate market and especially high concentration of extremely wealthy individuals, Dubai emerged last year as the most important non-European destination for Belgian business travellers. Journalist Filip Michiels and photographer Isabel Pousset ...

HAVANA - Everyone has an opinion about Cuba, but in 'Cuba after Castro' Lode Delputte shows what is really at stake. Cuba's future is inextricably linked to its self-proclaimed glorious past. No reasonable person would doubt that Fidel Castro's time is long gone. Even the political elite in Havana ...

KABUL - There will soon be 100,000 Western troops in Afghanistan, including 400 Belgians. Yet year after year, the insurgents are gaining ground.

BRUSSELS - 'Gypsies. Sinti and Roma under the swastika' is the first Dutch-language overview book on the fate of Sinti and Roma in Europe during the Nazi era, from 1933 to 1945. Like the Jews, the so-called 'Gypsies' were persecuted because, according to Nazi ideology, they were an inferior race.

BRUSSELS - Can we expect pill manufacturers to provide objective information? This is the first in a series of articles on the influence of the pharmaceutical industry in Europe.

PANKOVKA - Now aged 83, Oswald Van Ooteghem has lived many lives. When he was 16, he volunteered to join the Flemish Legion and fight alongside the Waffen-SS on the Eastern Front in Russia.

BRUSSELS - In recent years, the European Union has emerged at a dizzying pace as a global military player. Since 2003, Brussels has deployed soldiers to troubled regions while London, Paris and Berlin have charted the course, albeit without agreeing on the direction to take. Could a fully-fledged ...

ANTWERP – Theatre director and journalist Michaël De Cock set out to explore his own city, seeking answers to a question that has been troubling him: just how divided is Antwerp?

BEIJING - China is everywhere. Yet we know little or nothing about the country and its people. What we mainly notice is that there are more and more Chinese people around. Today, there are around 1.3 billion of them. They are people with dreams, aspirations and hopes. Lots of hopes. This book is ...

COPENHAGEN - Danish police are investigating the inner workings of the 'Nonstop Bio Cinerotic' porn cinema, which rents out rooms to Nigerian sex slaves in Copenhagen's red light district. Until very recently, one of the directors of the cinema was Guy Paquot, a Belgian knight and top executive of ...

JOHANNESBURG - South Africa attracts a large number of migrants and refugees from across the African continent. However, the country lacks the institutions required to manage or accommodate this steady influx.

BRUSSELS - Belgium is a magnet for foreign intelligence services. The mere presence of the European institutions and NATO on Belgian soil attracts a large number of spies. European leaders are bugged, and secret NATO files are passed on to the enemy. But that is not all. Foreign spies are ...

LUSAKA - Elections will be held in Zambia on 28 September 2006. President Mwanawasa hopes that voters will reward his efforts to combat corruption, but the likelihood of this is low. This is because Mwanawasa himself appears to have anything but clean hands. Meanwhile, Zambia and the rest of the ...

BRUSSELS/TARGIA - Asbestos is the perfect model of a substance mined, industrially exploited and widely marketed as a miracle material without proper research into its long-term effects on health. Indeed, it went on being promoted long after it was recognised as dangerous.

KUKËS - The Kukes Prefecture, located in north-eastern Albania near the border with Kosovo, is one of the poorest regions in the country. It has a population of almost 120,000, 75% of whom live in rural areas.

KIGALI - Emma Dardenne, a widow living alone in Brussels (Belgium), was born in Rwanda in 1908 from a Rwandan mother and captain Heinrich von Bethe, a German officer on post in the German colony at that time. Despite the age of 95 and accompanied by her daughter Paulette and her grandson Manu she ...