Supported projects

BRUSSELS - Experienced staff are being fired, volunteers are dropping out and losses are piling up. Meanwhile, external consultants earn up to €20,000 a month. What is going on at Action Damien?

COPENHAGEN - By 2050, the earth will have 10 billion inhabitants. At the same time, the area of available agricultural land per person is shrinking. As climate disrupts, classical farming systems are colliding with their limits.

GHENT - At 16, Sofie developed symptoms of what later turned out to be anxiety and depressive disorder. On social media, it seems like every young person struggles with it. Wouldn't it be nice to start a club? Based on her own experiences, Sofie Steenhaut talks to club members and experts. Welcome to Club Anxiety!

KABWE - One of the largest lead mines in the world closes in 1994. Local people in Kabwe, a metropolis in Zambia, see jobs disappear. They are left uninvited with a mountain of harmful mining waste and residential areas polluted by lead.

BWINDI - The Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park in Uganda has been chosen by the US National Health Institute (NHI) as a ‘hotspot’ for a potential new outbreak of a zoonotic disease like Monkeypox, Covid or Ebola.

BRUSSELS - After a delay of more than six months, the GATE drug consumption room opened its doors in the Belgian capital on 5 May 2022. Can this project succeed in Brussels and can this harm prevention tool be developed in other cities in Belgium, Europe and in Flanders?

ABUJA - Nigeria is struggling with the threat of undifferentiated waste disposal and water pollution affecting the health of its citizens. Nigerian journalists Oke Peter and Damilola Shittu unravel how the effect of climate change, the inadequate waste disposal system and water pollution are endangering the lives of Nigerians.

BRUSSELS - The sperm bank appeals to the imagination. Especially its pioneering years, when there were no rules and doctors did as they pleased. Yet hardly anyone knows how it used to be, because donor insemination happened in the greatest secrecy.

CAPE TOWN - While in Belgium almost eighty per cent of the population has been vaccinated, in Africa the percentage is still pitifully low.

AMSTERDAM/BRUSSELS - 70 to 90 per cent of patients with unexplained symptoms are women. Why do female patients receive a (correct) diagnosis less often? What is the impact of this on their lives? How can this be done differently and better in the future? In the podcast Geen kleine man (No little man), AudioCollectief SCHIK and journalist Sofie Peeters take a closer look at this issue.

BRUSSELS - 1 in 10 Belgians uses heavy painkillers such as oxycodone, tramadol and fentanyl. Effective painkillers, but with a high addiction risk: about 8% of everyone who comes into contact with opioid painkillers becomes dependent on them. The longer you use, the higher the risk. Research journalists Laura Dhaese and Marie Borremans focus on the patient's perspective: how do you get rid of an addiction to painkillers and what kind of care can you get?

AMSTERDAM - From the age of twelve until the age of twenty-two, Erwin Roebroeks was in the grip of a compulsive disorder. He showered eight hours a day, drank soapsuds while wearing surgical gowns, and cut open his skin to be able to clean the inside. At first, the medical world wrote him off. Roebroeks will never get rid of his severe obsessive-compulsive disorder (ocd).

BRUSSELS - In elderly care, sleeping pills, sedatives, antidepressants and antipsychotics are widely used. This is not a new phenomenon. Already in 2006, a study brought alarming figures to light. Since then, the pill shop in Flemish residential care centres has been running smoothly. Is the prescription of these psychopharmaceuticals to elderly people justified? Is it done for the right reasons, or just to keep them calm?

SAMOS - The harrowing conditions in the hotspots of the Greek islands of Lesbos, Samos and Chios have created a mental health crisis. Depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and self-harm are the most common mental health problems reported by NGOs in the field.

BRUSSELS - How will this pandemic shape the next generation? The middle class is fighting a valiant battle to reconcile family and professional life, but the vulnerable are fighting the same battle with more limited resources.

SANAA - Yemen already suffered from a high rate of birth defects and infant mortality before the war, due in part to intrafamily marriages and lack of family planning, but the hospitals we visited in three different provinces are adamant that there has been an unprecedented increase since the war. 

Although narcissism is a popular theme in today's media, there is also much confusion about it. This series explores what narcissism is and how destructive the consequences can be for people in close contact with a narcissist. The witnesses are former partners or relatives of.

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.

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.

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.

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.

BRUSSELS - If you or your mother were born between 1947 and 1977, there is a chance that you will recognize yourself in this story about DES. Maybe your mother or grandmother took DES as a medicine when she was pregnant.

KINSHASHA - In the maternity clinics in Kinshasa, hundreds of mothers and their newborn children are locked up. Weeks, months, sometimes even years. Reason: they cannot pay hospital bills after childbirth. The report "Gasthuis Gevangenis" (Hospital prison) investigates this phenomenon and goes in search of the underlying cause of this problem.

AMSTERDAM - Only when Corien van Zweden lost her left breast to breast cancer did she delve into the biology and meaning of this intimate part of the body. She discovered that there is no other part of the body with such a multi-faceted course of life as the female breast.

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 US$ 1,90 a day.

EL SALVADOR - "When I woke up in the hospital, there were police officers around me. They said that I had killed my child." Maria Teresa De Rivera is 34 when she gets a miscarriage on the toilet. Due to strict abortion laws in her country, she is sentenced to 40 years in prison. She not only loses a child, but also her freedom. Under pressure from, among others, the Catholic Church, El Salvador has one of the strictest abortion laws in the world.

KAPELLE OP DEN BOS/KYMORE - Kapelle-op-den-Bos is where the filmmaker Daniel Lambo was born. Life was good there. Daniel's father worked in the local Eternit factory. The company was one of the world's biggest asbestos producers. Today, we know what happens when people make asbestos, and for many people, this is a problem that happened in the past. But the problem with asbestos is still there, as we see when we look at what Eternit was doing in other countries.