Supported projects

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 ...

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

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’.

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 ...

BOEDAPEST - Een jaar geleden kocht de Belgische regering 2 miljoen ton CO2-emissierechten van Hongarije. Deze investering van 26 miljoen euro heeft tot doel te voldoen aan de verplichtingen van het land in het kader van het Kyoto-protocol: de uitstoot tegen 2012 met 7,5 procent verminderen ten ...

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 ...

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.

COPENHAGEN - Danish police are investigating the ins and outs of the porn cinema shop ‘Nonstop Bio Cinerotic, which rents out rooms to Nigerian sex slaves in Copenhagen's red light district. One of the directors of the sex cinema shop was until very recently - in a personal capacity - Belgian knight ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

NEW DELHI - Grensloos India (India without frontiers) is a collection of critical travel essays with political depth. The book is a combination of travelogue, reflection and reportage on various facets of modern India: globalisation, the computer industry, religion and politics, poverty and ...