Supported projects

LATINA - How, through debt, a network of intermediaries linking India to the Pontine countryside keeps thousands of Indian workers under blackmail, exploited in one of the largest fruit and vegetable districts in Europe.

HUELVA - Across the southern Iberian Peninsula, plastic greenhouses stretch to the horizon where rain-fed olives, wheat and grapes were traditionally grown. Spain and Portugal are Europe’s main producers of water-intensive berries. But the region is also one of the continent’s driest areas, where ...

IXQUISIS - These series looked into lives and deaths of ‘Water Guardians’. The journalists investigated in depth three environmental murders related to water in Latin America.

VODNANY - In Babiš's poultry factories, there was an organised violation of the Labour Code, while the management of the poultry factories could not help but know that they were cooperating with the underworld in the exploitation of Vietnamese workers.

PUNJAB - For years, the focus has been on men from Punjab who get trafficked to Europe, which is also colloquially known as Kabootar Baazi. This investigation by Journalismfund's grantees reveal how Punjabi women are increasingly being trafficked by travel agents from India, but due to the social ...

DJOEBA - Although best known as an oil producer, South Sudan has significant gold deposits, with activity largely dominated by artisanal mining.

ANTWERP / BRUSSELS / GHENT - As of 9 June 2021, the rules for sex work are normalising. After months of vacancy, activity in the zones of tolerance for window prostitution is getting back on track. In the past, sex workers and bar owners have been much investigated, but the property owners are a ...

NAIROBI - This story uncovers a multitude of worrying allegations about the unregulated surrogacy industry in Kenya.

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 ...

JOHANNESBURG - Close to two thirds of women in poor areas in Africa resort to selling sex to be able to feed themselves and their families. That is the result of a random interviewing exercise conducted in seven African countries in areas where the average income is on or below the poverty line of ...

MAPUTO - In poverty-stricken Mozambique, young women are obliged to sell their bodies to wealthier or white men. A general wisdom with cliché status. But is such a simple analysis correct? What does international research say and what do the women themselves think about their sexual practices and ...

CAPE TOWN - A number of fishing companies are flouting international law, exploiting workers, and over-fishing, thus stripping vulnerable countries of a vital food source.

SAN SALVADOR - Strikingly absent in the American political debate: the issue of the Central American refugee crisis. Journalist Arthur Debruyne traveled along the migration route between Mexico and the United States.

CONSTANTA - Smugglers, some of them organised in networks, are profiting from migrants' despair by selling them their services. The trade is making them a fortune – and fuelling their criminal enterprise with cash.

CAPE TOWN - The world behind a glass of South-African wine. Emma Lesuis went back to the winery where she made the documentary "Vir 'n glasie wyn" (For a glass of wine) and saw that little had changed. That's why she went looking for solutions and discovered the world of Fairtrade. 

MERERANI - In the mines near Mererani in the north of Tanzania, miners search feverishly for tanzanite. Everyone hopes one day to find a beautiful large specimen of the unique gemstone and to become rich in one fell swoop. In recent years the government has taken extra measures to keep as much of ...

PHNOM PENH - The jeans or denim jacket that you bought recently have likely been made in Cambodia. A strike of thousands of textile workers was violently suppressed there a year ago. Journalist Ate Hoekstra and photographer Kristof Vadino show that not much has changed since then.

NOUAKCHOTT - Officially, slavery does no longer exists in Mauritania, a barren desert country in West Africa. However, according to Anti-Slavery International, at least 4% of the Mauritanians are still owned by a master. They are born as slaves and have never known freedom. Not even in their minds.

KATUNITSA - Some 10 to 12 million Roma are estimated to travel around Europe. The political dimension of this ethnical and social challenge is an ongoing discussion in the EU, but what is never told is the dark economy of Roma migration. Who benefits from the large afflux of mainly poor people into ...

STELLENBOSCH - South African winegrowers produce more than seven thousand different wines and are among the wealthy elite in the country. Millions of consumers around the world taste the high quality of South African wine, but the workers who pick and process the grapes barely enjoy the added value ...

RIGA - Hundreds of women come to Ireland each year to marry non-Europeans – with the sole aim of securing visas for their new husbands. Most of them are from poor Eastern European states such as Latvia and Lithuania, where the offer of a few thousand euros is enough to lure women into such a “sham ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...