International report

Psychiatry remains a under developed area of health across most of West Africa. In the Gambia, there is only one psychiatric hospital for the whole country, which means around 100 beds for two million inhabitants.

The first hospital was opened in the 1960s in Banjul in a building that was previously a former jail. Conditions were poor so in 2009 the hospital was moved to outside the city to a new building financed by a Dutch NGO.

Today, the workers of the Tanka-Tanka hospital try to offer the best care possible in a country where traditional medicines rather than hospitals are used to tackle mental health problems. Claire Bargelès has this report, the second in a series of five on health in the Gambia.

In an effort to improve its emergency services, The Gambia chose to delegate the management of ambulances to an organisation called Riders for Health.

The British NGO has been in charge of all the public ambulances of the country for 15 years. It operates in eight other African countries and takes care of all the logistics as well as the trianing of the drivers.

Even still, between the quality of the roads and the driving habits of the locals there still remains many challenges to overcome.Claire Bargelès has the first report of five on health in the Gambia.

The Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan starts a five day visit of North and West Africa. The tour is latest effort by Turkey to project its influence across the continent and enhance its global presence. Erdogan coming from an Islamist background is increasingly using the Islamic card in those efforts. But as Dorian Jones reports from Istanbul, Turkish aspirations could be stoking regional rivalries and even tensions.

In Sierra Leone, six months after the deadly floods and mudslides, which killed more than 1,000 people, nothing has changed for the survivors. Those who had no family to welcome them, are still waiting to be sheltered by authorities. And some may not even benefit from any help. Maïla Mendy reports from Freetown.

When Kosovo declared independence from Serbia ten years ago, many Serbs were living in Kosovo as a minority, in a country where Albanians are the majority: the Serbs had stayed in Kosovo after the wars of the 1990s that saw Kosovo's Albanians fighting Serbia. Today the country still has several Serbian areas. In this final report from a five part series, Clea Broadhurst visits one of these areas - Gracanica, close to the capital Pristina.

Just a few months ago (October 2017) the small Balkan country of Kosovo held its first official gay pride parade, in the capital Pristina. Life for gay and lesbian people in Kosovo still has its difficulties however, as Clea Broadhurst explores this fourth report in a five part series.

Kosovo's main minority population are the Serbs, who live alongside the majority Albanian population. When the country became independent from Serbia ten years ago, its new constitution declared that its two official languages would be Albanian and Serbian.

But there are other minority groups in Kosovo - the Ashkali, Balkan Egyptians and Roma: often victims of prejudice and discrimination.

As Clea Broadhurst explains in this third report from a five part series, bridges are being built to integrate these small cultural minorities into Kosovo's population.

Since Kosovo declared independence from Serbia ten years ago, only 23 of the EU's 28 member states have recognised it. For Spain, Cyprus, Greece, Slovakia and Romania, the country simply doesn't exist.

This means people in Kosovo can have difficulty travelling in Europe for business.

But young entrepreneurs in Kosovo are getting around this, in part, by concentrating on digital startups, as Clea Broadhurst found out while in the capital Pristina, in this second report of a five part series.

When Kosovo declared independence from Serbia ten years ago, it was as a secular state with no official state religion. Most of the two million people in Kosovo are Muslim, a legacy of Kosovo's time as part of the Ottoman empire.

But the country also has a long tradition of Catholicism albeit 'hidden', forced underground under the Ottomans. Today, though, a tiny number of those so-called "hidden Catholics" are beginning to surface. In the first of a five part series, Clea Broadhurst goes looking for those Catholics.

Every year a group of women in Senegal organises a clothing drive to donate items of clothing to women in prison. In Senegal, 3.7% of the prison population is made up of women. They often lack toiletries as well as a change of clothes.

The annual clothing swap is the brainchild of an American expat and a Senegalese social worker and their mutual wish to improve the living conditions of incarcerated women in Dakar.

Emmanuelle Landais has this report.