Supported projects

NAIROBI - European media regularly report on human rights violations by multinational companies 'from here'. Various Flemish media reported that a Brussels construction company would engage in forced labour in Qatar in preparation for the World Cup. Swedish journalists Tobias Åkerblom and Moa Kärnstrand revealed that a Swedish clothing brand would employ children aged 14 in Myanmar. However, multinationals born and raised in emerging economies are often forgotten.

BELGRADE - Writer and historian Irene van der Linde and documentary photographer Nicole Segers travel in the footsteps of the British writer Rebecca West through former Yugoslavia and Albania. With West's magnum opus Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1942) in their hands, they go in search of the meaning of the new borders in the Balkans.

AUSTIN - Louise Van Assche is a documentary filmmaker who lives and works in Austin, Texas. She was born and raised in Belgium and has Congolese roots. A year ago she moved to Austin, the capital of Texas. There she ended up in the middle of the Black Lives Matter protests. It touched her personally and she decided to take to the streets to make a report.

BRAKEN - The Belgian town of Braken, on the Dutch border, is home to 1.2 million chickens. They divide the town: residents are tired of the smell, the fine dust and the heavy traffic in their village. To objectify the discussion, the local government ordered an air quality study.

BRUSSELS - A pregnancy test that could lead to a miscarriage or a child with a birth defect. Abroad, the drug Duogynon is causing controversy to this day. This autumn, a British victims' organisation is suing the manufacturer, pharmaceutical giant Schering (now Bayer).

SCHIEDAM - A radically different view of cholesterol and cardiovascular disease, that is what The Cholesterol Myth is all about. Part of it is that cholesterol is no longer the big bogeyman, but, according to experts, can be seen as a positive, body-specific, even healing substance. On closer inspection, cholesterol also plays a positive role in our diet. These visions underpinned in the book raise the question of what causes all those cardiovascular patients to die every day, just as the author almost lost his father.

BEIRUT - On 17 October 2019, a revolution broke out in Lebanon that is still raging among the people. The - young, secular - population is trying to break free, while the divided sectarian power apparatus is digging deeper. The ongoing Lebanese popular protests resulted in the largest national protest since the civil war (75-90). All Lebanese, regardless of their frame of reference within the melting pot of cultures, unite under one banner against the corrupt commanders

KINSHASA - The research by Jeroen Janssen, awarded graphic novelist, and journalist Hilde Baele on Mzee Jérôme Sebasoni, who became Che Guevara's guide as a young Inyenzi rebel, took no less than 12 years.

MERKSPLAS - March 2020. Corona shuts down Belgium. Everyone has to stay inside. Door closed, one hour a day outside. A story that sounds familiar to the residents of Merksplas prison.

BRUSSELS - As a child, journalist Brecht Castel lost his father after suicide. Twenty years later he is left with questions. Questions that not only concern himself, because in Flanders an average of three people get out of life every day.

ANTWERP - Karl van den Broeck, who succeeded Georges Timmerman as editor-in-chief of Apache in 2014, tells in a six-part series how the top man of De Persgroep (now DPG Media) committed a sophisticated stealth murder on Flanders' most important independent progressive newspaper De Morgen. 

BRUSSELS - This is the first article in a series on homelessness focusing on the Belgian capital city, where homelessness has more than doubled in ten years.

BOURBON-LANCY - On the 1st of August Tom Ysewijn leaves Ghent with his bicycle to Lisbon. His route runs along the "outlying areas", places in the countryside in France, Spain and Portugal that are becoming more and more depopulated. During this tour, which can be followed via MO*, he goes in search of the voice of the countryside.

KABUL/KINSHASHA/JUBA - No Olympics this summer. But Elien did seek and feel the Olympic spirit: in Afghan women's football, wheelchair basketball in South Sudan and with nzozo players in Congo. These champions wouldn't have made it to the Olympics anyway, but the Olympic spirit is clearly present.

FALTECINI - Belgian police and army uniforms are made in Romanian factories with Belgian owners, by seamstresses who can barely make a living from their wages. What is wrong with our public tenders? "As long as price remains the most important award criterion, someone always pays the price.

AUGUSTA - What if you could measure a mother's future dreams for her children against the life that has become? In 1995 the photographer Elisabeth Broekaert travelled to Maine, in the north-east of the United States. Ronnie and Laurie Moulton opened their doors and let her make portraits that were then published in the Belgian newspaper De Standaard.

The Emperor of OTRAG is a non-fiction story that tries to find out what forces led to the creation and demise of the first private space company and takes the reader from old West Germany to Mobutu's Zaire, Gaddafi's Libya, the Mojave Desert in California and an island in the Pacific where Lutz Kayser spent the last 10 years of his life. It raises the question of how far someone wants to go to make his dream come true.

BRUSSELS - A lot goes wrong with our tax collection. There are so many loopholes that the tax authorities collect a lot less than what the state is entitled to. This is one of the reasons why the government has to borrow and why we have a large national debt.

BRUSSELS - The deep, blue oceans are home to an unprecedented wealth of biodiversity, as well as the planet's last unexploited resources. The race to the ocean floor is in full swing and Belgium is in the leading group.

BRUSSELS - We call them transmigrants. Also known as 'illegals'. Almost a swear word. Caroline van Gastel and Saar Van Eyck shed light on the harsh daily reality of a number of young women in Brussels. They come from Eritrea, Ethiopia and Sudan where the regime oppresses the population and conflicts between communities are fought violently. The people can barely survive. They have to leave family and children behind in search of work. When they will see them again, nobody knows.

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.

CABO DELGADO - There are diamonds, gold and a gigantic gas bubble in the ground, but that doesn't help the inhabitants of Cabo Delgado, Mozambique. The government abandons them and the army can't protect them from violence. The militant Islamist group Al-Shabab manages more and more to recruit the impoverished population with an ill-founded, religious story. MO* went to the heart of the affected province.

NEW YORK - The documentary 'Pride is Protest' offers an insight into the LGBTQ scene in New York, 50 years after Stonewall. Marieke Dermul and Filip Tielens went to New York for a week in June 2019 during the biggest Pride ever.

CHANG MAI - In a small village in Thailand, Pomm takes care of Europeans with Alzheimer’s. Separated from her children, she helps Elisabeth during the final stages of her life, as a new patient arrives from Switzerland.

BRUSSELS - One-third of the women in Belgium have a pension of less than 750 euros. That's little, but doesn't have to be a problem: if you are happily married, have a long career behind you and can put the money together as a couple. But for a whole group of women, this is not the case. The baby boomers are the first generation to divorce in such large numbers. Before that, couples used to stay together forever.

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. Or they buy themselves a motorbike. First alone, as an exception, which provokes opposition and sometimes outright attacks. Now more and more numerous, they close ranks, form motorcycle clubs and lead demonstrations against violence against women.

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 vehicles, will become possible via 5G. But our mobile internet is also increasingly becoming a critical infrastructure around which many conflicts are emerging. Today, we fear that the Chinese are bugging us with 5G, that its radiation is giving us cancer, that 5G is being rolled out too slowly in our country and even that it will cause our companies to close down.

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 all problems are solved.

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 him and he had a phenomenal archive. He died young from Alzheimer's.