Supported projects

BRUSSELS - There is very little transparency in the private security sector. Questions often remain unanswered because the contracts are withheld on the grounds of commercial confidentiality. This lack of information means it is hard if not impossible to speak truth to powerful private security ...

BRUSSELS - Belgians are top in sorting out garbage. But what happens to the PET bottles we throw in the blue bag? Exactly how many PET bottles do we recycle? And does recycling really reduces fossil plastic production?

DHAKA - The women in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka are fed up with it: they want to be able to go out on the streets without men bothering them. And so they organise their own transport through the impossibly chaotic, congested traffic: a motor-taxi with a woman at the wheel.

BRUSSELS - This investigation seeks to uncover the state of facial recognition technology in Europe. The journalists obtained leaked internal European Union documents that reveal law enforcement is lobbying to create a network of national police facial recognition databases. 

ACCRA, LAGOS - This story identifies the lapses in the current tax systems and how Ghana and Nigeria are dealing with profit shifting and tax avoidance. It exposes how major tech companies, Facebook and Google, use tax havens to avoid payment of taxes in Nigeria and Ghana, depriving these countries ...

ANTWERP - 5G promises to become the infrastructure of the future. For example, the new, fifth generation of mobile internet would be up to one hundred times faster than 4G, and will provide a platform on which new technology is built. The most innovative things, from remote operations to autonomous ...

BRUSSELS - Climate change could leave you homeless overnight – right here, in Europe. Flash floods, mudslides and wildfires triggered by heatwaves are among the extreme weather events becoming increasingly common thanks to our changing climate.

AMSTERDAM, NAIROBI - Dutch flower growers in Kenya avoid corporate taxation, using transfer pricing and offshore constructions. The loss of tax revenue due to these practices is substantial and has large consequences for Kenyan society.

GHENT - The measures that Flemish universities have taken to lower the threshold for reporting transgressive behaviour are effective at first sight. The number of reports has increased, among others at the University of Ghent, because victims (dare to) report faster. However, that does not mean that ...

MUMBAI - This story focuses on the suicide epidemic of Indian farmers related to over-indebtedness. For the first time the names of the lenders and their donors involved in the farmers' suicides due to overindebeteness are uncovered.

ANTWERP - He was one of the most important investigative journalists in Belgium. He published revelations about the murder of the leader of the socialist party André Cools, the Gang of Nivelles, the arms trade and the extreme right. He loved the idea that those in power would have been safer without ...

NEW DELHI - According to the Thomson Reuters Foundation, India is the most dangerous country in the world for women. Nowhere more girls are sold as slaves. In melting Himalayan glaciers, prolonged drought, devastating storms and disappearing islands, human traffickers found new allies. Floods make ...

ARBIL - With Little Survivors Lotte Knaepen and Lisa Matthys made a report in Kurdistan (Northern Iraq). The story is about the Yazidis, a people who were persecuted by ISIS. Many Yazidi children became victims of human trafficking, were separated from their families, used as slaves or trained as ...

GAZA - As early as eight years ago, the UN warned that the Gaza Strip was at risk of becoming unlivable by 2020. At the beginning of that year, De Morgen journalist Martijn Lauwens went to see what that means. He travelled around the isolated Palestinian enclave for a week and asked the people there ...

YEREVAN - Kubra was born and raised in Belgium. However, her family is Turkish, at least, that's what they thought, because she was brought up as a Belgian Turk: with Turkish customs and the Islamic faith. Internal doubts lead her to have a DNA test taken in 2017 to see if she actually has Turkish ...

BRUSSELS - When is the use of a subsidy for an independent entrepreneur justified and when is there abuse? Sofie Van Nuffel came across statements that suggest that not everything can be guaranteed by trust alone. 

MYANMAR - The Karen People are an ethnic minority of eastern and southern Burma (Myanmar). Many Karen people live in north-western Thailand as refugees from the decades-long Karen insurgency and Burmese government oppression. 

MALTA - The model for the privatisation of Malta’s public hospitals negotiated by now disgraced Minister Konrad Mizzi and the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff Keith Schembri, with the approval of Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, was exported to Balkan States with weak democratic structures that enable ...

DAMASCUS - Over thousands of camel shepherds have fled Syria to the European Union, crossing the sea and mountains to seek refuge following the tragic ongoing war, that has changed their lifestyle with loss of camels to illegal trafficking. 

TANGIER - Hirak protests broke out in northern Morocco three years ago. Following the terrible death of a fish seller, the Riffines were crying out for good education, health care, work, fair justice and the fight against corruption. But the regime hit hard, resulting in hundreds of arrests. The ...

BRUSSELS - The Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF) is the European Union's largest funding mechanism for development, stability and migration in Africa. Over the past three years it has spent 4,6 billion euro in 26 African countries. This money, however, has not been spent following the proper ...

TBILISI - Every December, 80 million Christmas trees are sold across Europe. The majority of these, 45 million, are Nordmann firs, which originate from the Caucasus region. Eighty per cent of the Nordmann firs cultivated in Europe originate from seeds harvested in western Georgia.

ABIDJAN - In this story, investigative journalists Daan Bauwens and Nicholas Ibekwe focus on Highway 10, the transatlantic route that for centuries brought millions of captured African slaves to South-America via the tenth parallel.

BEERVELDE - Every night the last train leaves for the Belgian village of Beervelde, located along the E17. From the station, young men and women try to reach one of the nearby motorway parking lots, usually on foot. There they try to get on a truck that will bring them to England.

ANTWERP - Thanks to more than 450 volunteers the cultural center called De Roma keeps going. Why do they put their heart and soul into this theater in Borgerhout near Antwerp? Television maker Lies Van der Auwera tried to find the answer. 

SEOUL - From 1932 through 1945, the Japanese Imperial Army and Navy exploited a system of forced prostitution in all occupied territories in China, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean, enslaving women and girls of many ethnicities as so-called ‘comfort women'. These war crime victims represent 34 ...

KYIV - In the course of the moratorium on forest felling in Ukraine, bypassing not only national legislation but also EU regulations and certifications, Ukrainian timber is cut and harvested at such a rate that over four years its exports to the EU countries increased by 75%, exceeding the mark in a ...

LAGOS - Lured by the prospects of a better life, thousands of African youths are braving the risks of crossing the Sahara and the Mediterranean for a chance to live in Europe. Victor, a 28-year old Nigerian graduate is one of several thousands of young Nigerians who have made the dangerous journey ...

BOGOTA - Belgium is a banana republic, as far as trade is concerned. There are only three countries in the world that import more bananas than we do: the United States, Russia and China. But we export 87 percent, or 1.17 tons, of those bananas. Most bananas come from Colombia. 

ANTANANARIVO - When the news from Beijing reached Madagascar on September 6th, 2018, that a deal of 2.7 billion USD was signed on the country’s “blue economy” with China, people in the second largest island country panicked. Rightfully so. Nobody, including the fishing ministry, had heard of such a ...