The Documentary Podcast

Look at any fiction prize recently and odds are that you will find a Zimbabwean woman nominated, be it Tsitsi Dangaremba, NoViolet Bulawayo or Petina Gappah. But forget the glitz of the Booker, what is the situation inside Zimbabwe? Reporter Tawanda Mudzonga takes us on a literary tour of Zimbabwe to find out why it has produced so many talented and renowned women writers. Tawanda speaks to emergi...

The Women’s World Cup is underway and global attention is once again on women in sport. Host James Reynolds brings together Preeti Singh, a national and international basketball player for India, lawyer and former England netball player Eboni Usoro-Brown and Jennifer Jones, one of Canada’s most successful female curlers. They compare notes on the progress in their respective professions. We also g...

The battle to keep the peace between people and elephants in northern Botswana. The earth’s largest land mammal, the elephant, is an endangered species. Poaching, habitat loss and disease have decimated elephant populations. But not in Botswana, which has the world’s biggest population of elephants. In the north of the country, in the area around the remarkable Okavango Delta (the world’s largest...

The world's most followed religion is changing rapidly. Hannah Ajala explores how church bells travelling from Italy to Nigeria herald Africa's new role as the beating heart of Christianity. The Marinelli family in Italy have been making church bells for nearly 1,000 years. But in recent decades demand from Italy has fallen as faith dwindles, whilst orders from sub-Saharan Africa have grown dramat...

Brooklyn-based architectural practice SO|IL's have garnered a reputation for crafting exquisite arts spaces. They are joined by musician Ben Lovett, one of the founding members of folk rock outfit, Mumford & Sons. When he is not on stage, he puts his energy into reinvigorating tired music venues with his company TVG. Launching in 2016, TVG is now a leader in this field, helping to ensure the s...

Millions of people around the world have been living under heat advisories due to record hot temperatures. The exceptional heat is being felt across Europe, the US, North Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Host James Reynolds hears from three farmers in South Africa, Nigeria and the UK about how they are having to adapt their work and methods due to the extreme conditions. We hear from three doctor...

On a busy street in Los Angeles a group of people in yellow vests are holding a ladder against a lamppost. Up the ladder, 34-year-old Evan Clark is ripping down a sign that is nailed to the post. It reads “Jesus: The way, the truth, the life”. These are members of the Atheist Street Pirates, local activists who track and remove religious signs affixed to public property. They, along with other vol...

Tunisia’s democracy is being dismantled by a president who claims he’s saving it from anarchy. Parliament has been dissolved, scores of judges sacked and opponents jailed. Once Tunisia - the north African country of just 12 million people squeezed between it’s much bigger neighbours Libya and Algeria - was a beacon of democracy. It was the first Arab country to overthrow it’s dictator Ben Ali in 2...

For centuries, Kew Gardens was the flash point for a lesser known British imperial project – the collection of plants from colonised nations for political and commercial gain. Author and journalist Rosie Kinchen finds out about the work Kew is doing today to examine this, and looks into how the institution is supporting botanical science and conservation around the globe. Rosie speaks to curatoria...

Acclaimed and award-winning Shakespearean, Gregory Doran, has directed every play in Shakespeare’s First Folio except Cymbeline. For him it’s one of Shakespeare’s most complex creations and he will be directing it for the first time as his swansong, as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s artistic director emeritus. From the start of the production’s rehearsal period until its first performance, we fol...

The Euros 2022 saw the Lionesses finally ‘bring it home’ - the excitement and crowd numbers showed there was a huge demand for women’s football. Ahead of the Women’s 2023 World Cup this documentary explores whether opportunities for women have changed. What is the state of play for women’s football around the globe?

Prices almost everywhere are going up, which means most of us have less money to spend. At the heart of it is inflation, the rate at which prices are rising. It means paying higher costs for everything, from food to transport, clothes to power, and less on life’s luxuries. Host James Reynolds has been bringing people around the world together to share their experiences of inflation. Three people l...

As a shaman, Sipa Melo is the beating heart of tribal faith and culture in a remote corner of north-east India, tucked in the shadow of the Himalayan Mountains. He's a healer, a story-teller and a protector of the natural world. Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent joins Sipa for a week of ritual, performing ceremonies to mark deaths and births and maintaining taboos that help preserve this mountainous region...

Kaaps is a language widely spoken in the bleak townships of Cape Town, South Africa. It’s often denigrated as a lesser form of Afrikaans – the language that was used as a tool of white supremacy during the apartheid era. Spoken predominately by working class people on the Cape Flats, Kaaps is associated with negative stereotypes – its speakers denigrated as uneducated, "ghetto" layabouts involved...

Many Western fashion brands source garments from Bangladesh, a country with a long history of producing affordable clothing. The industry suffered a devastating disaster in 2013 when the eight-storey Rana Plaza factory building near Dhaka collapsed, costing the lives of more than 1100 workers. Ten years on, Bangladesh has tried to reinvent its image: it has brought in safer working conditions and...

In September 2017, The International Olympic Committee announced that a century after France last hosted the Olympics in 1924, the games would be returning to Paris for the third time in its history. The 2024 games, are set to become the most sustainable games to date and are following a new model -which involves only two new construction projects for the entire games – The Aquatics Centre and Oly...

France has questions to answer around inequity and its approach to policing. It follows days of violent protests after the fatal shooting in Paris, during a police traffic stop, of a 17-year-old boy of Algerian descent. The world also witnessed some of the country’s social issues laid bare, as anger around discrimination in some of France’s poorest areas spread across the country and came, once ag...

Hannah Ajala, a Nigerian-British broadcaster explores the new generation of chieftaincy and royalty in Nigeria. She takes a closer look at some of the key aspects of an inauguration ceremony across various states in Nigeria, and the impact Nigerian royalty has within Diaspora. Hannah speaks to the new wave of Chiefs and Kings embracing this tradition and why they continue with this path whilst int...

In 2014, militants of the Islamic State group set out to destroy the ancient, minority Yazidi community of northern Iraq. Thousands were murdered, thousands of Yazidi women and children were enslaved and brutalised. Since the defeat of IS in 2017, the traumatized community has tried to recover. And yet, as Rachel Wright reports, more than 100,000 Yazidis remain stuck in camps, unable to return to...

Russia's once shadowy private military company Wagner hit the headlines around the world when the group’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, ordered his men to march on Moscow. Although the insurrection was short lived, the impact is felt far and wide. The Global Jigsaw from BBC Monitoring examines the Wagner mutiny from the perspective of countries who have a reason to pay close attention.

The British artist, Shezad Dawood is known for his colourful textiles and multimedia artworks, often featuring music and VR to explore issues such as migration, the environment and climate change. His latest exhibition is inspired by the African American composer and musician Yusef Lateef and his 1988 novella Night in the Garden of Love. Join Anna Bailey as she follows Shezad creating his latest c...

Following the Wagner group march on Moscow, we hear from Russians and Belarusians.

The songwriter, poet and author, Nick Cave has a conversation about grief, faith and the spirituality of music with the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby. Nick writes hauntingly beautiful songs – the themes of which tackle deep questions about humanity – often drawing from biblical sources. In 2015, NIck's son Arthur, died in a tragic accident at the age of 15, after falling from a cliff. Last...

Assignment tells the story of a young street trader from Lagos who ended up at the heart of an organ harvesting plot involving a senior Nigerian politician and a hospital in the UK. The young man was tested, trafficked and tricked into a plot to remove his kidney, to donate to the daughter of one of Nigeria’s most powerful politicians. As Mark Lobel discovers, the criminal trial and conviction is...

On 1 July 2024, Biniam Girmay made history as the first black African rider to win a stage of cycling’s biggest race: the Tour de France. After a hard upbringing as one of six children in the Eritrean capital Asmara, he has become one of the most talented riders from the continent in the sport’s history. In 2023, Matt Warwick discovered what Girmay's victories have meant for Eritrea and Eritreans,...