Supported projects

BRUSSELS - How did we come to pay gold for a drug whose effectiveness has not been proven? This is the story of Remdesivir, a drug developed by the American company Gilead Sciences with large public funds to combat Ebola, and in July approved by the European Medicines Agency with "conditional authorisation" as the first antiviral against Covid 19.

CAPE TOWN - As dam levels dropped rapidly at the end of 2017 and Cape Town faced the looming threat of becoming the first major city where taps would run dry, households were forced to pull out all the stops to save water. But Coca Cola and other big industrial users were given a free pass.

The investigation of Annika Joeres and Susanne Götze illuminates a neglected subject of climate policy. They show what a powerful player the Lobby for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) has become for the European Climate Policy. 

AMSTERDAM - While the Covid recovery is increasing pressure on public finances and raising the prospect of tax increases, this new research from The Investigative Desk with support from the University of Bath shows, for the first time on this scale, which tax avoidance methods the world’s four largest publicly traded tobacco companies are using to minimise their tax bill. 

In 2018, Armenian citizens kicked out an authoritarian regime via a mass movement. Now they’re taking on an international mining company. Over the past years, activists and locals have blockaded Lydian International’s flagship $400m Amulsar gold mining project over environmental impacts. 

PRETORIA - Mining companies publicly listed in the United Kingdom must disclose the payments they make to governments, including taxes, royalties, and license fees. But this is not always the case in South Africa. A data investigation by a team of journalists and activists highlighted how these large royalty payment amounts are reported, while miners have no way of knowing where billions of dollars paid went.

PORTO DO ACU - For the construction of the Brazilian port of Porto do Açu, hundreds of families were forcibly evicted from their land. Fishermen lost their livelihoods and the promised jobs in the port never came. The port also turned up in one of the biggest corruption scandals in Brazil. All this did not stop the port of Antwerp from investing 20 million dollars in this controversial project.

DILOVASI - The Toxic Valley project looks into the environmental consequences of industrialisation in Turkey, and reveals a pattern of chemical dumping and polluting that has led to a widespread health crisis in the Kocaeli region, the most heavily industrialised area of the country.

PTOLEMAIDA - In Greece, coal is considered "national fuel" and policymakers have always treated it as such. The future of the coal industry, however, is not taken for granted. The price of coal has increased, the industry is operating against EU's environmental and economic policies and its proponents and opponents are more than ever at odds. 

BERLIN - Are online dating applications designed to make us react in a certain way? Why do men do not attract enough attention and women increasingly receive insults and inappropriate messages? Our grantees, Judith Duportail and Nicolas Kayser-Bril, investigated how the architecture of a dating application influences how users behave.