Supported projects

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 ...

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.

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.

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 ...

BRUSSELS – Drinking water is arguably one of the most strictly regulated foodstuffs. After all, it is vital for life and consumed in large quantities every day. The water that European water companies pump through their pipes is clean. But what about the water that comes out at the other end of the ...

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 ...

SURAT - Once upon a time, Antwerp was the world's centre for diamond trading and cutting. As of 2005, the trade is still present, but Antwerp's renowned diamond industry is in decline. In an increasingly globalised world, diamond processing here has become too labour-intensive and expensive.

BEIJING - China has been on a spectacular economic rise for several years. It threatens to overtake Europe and the US as a global power. Is it a bubble that is about to burst, or should the West really fear the "yellow peril"? Who are China's modern-day gold-diggers, and are Chinese workers being ...

TEHERAN - What is it like to get by day to day with religious guidelines but no money? For the September issue of MO*magazine, David Nollet travelled to Iran with Gie Goris. This article provides an analysis and photographs of a young population living under enormous pressure.

TUXTLA GUTIÉRREZ - In January 2004, it will be ten years since the Zapatista Army of Liberation (EZLN) took up arms in the Mexican state of Chiapas. The rebels set themselves an unlikely mission: to declare war on neoliberalism.

BRUSSELS - The outgoing Belgian finance minister, Didier Reynders, has secured eight secret contracts with tobacco manufacturers to fund the Rodin Foundation's anti-smoking campaigns.

KIGALI - After the genocide of 1994, the Rwandan government temporarily suspended history from the school curriculum. The characters in After Years of Walking - children, teachers, genocide killers, students and historians - all find themselves in an uncertain zone between the old history and a new ...

BRUSSELS - Europe is expanding. May 2004 will be the moment of truth. Europe will then extend beyond the tundra of Finland, the sovkhozes and kolkhozes of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, the billboard-cluttered landscape of Poland, the gypsy settlements of Slovakia and the nationalism-ridden ...

BRUSSELS – Marleen Teugels came face to face with the suffering of ailing Balkan veterans almost by chance. Shocked by their stories, she has delved ever deeper into the alien military world since the autumn of 1999. She has gradually come to realise that these complaints, obscure files and horrific ...

ZAVENTEM - Steven Decraene, Peter Denruyter and Geert Sciot are three journalists who have delved into the complex and tragic Sabena case. Sabena was the first national airline in Europe to disappear. How did this happen to the country's flying monument?