Big Wata: The Surfers of Sierra Leone (video)

Members of Sierra Leone's only surf club dream of putting Africa on the surfing map.

In 2007, the fishermen of a small fishing community in the West African country of Sierra Leone witnessed an unusual sight.

It was an NGO worker in the ocean. But he wasn't swimming. He was standing on top of a board, riding the waves.

The first - and only - surf club in Sierra Leone, it is at the heart of the local community: a source of pride and, occasionally, of tension.

Child Soldiers Reloaded: The Privatisation of War

How private companies recruit former child soldiers for military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

From opportunistic guns for hire on the fringe of domestic conflicts to a global force operating within a multibillion-dollar industry - the private military sector seems to be flourishing.

As armies and war increasingly become 'outsourced', private military companies have taken on a wider increasing range of responsibilities, from security and intelligence analysis to training and combat roles.

The Mountain Will Fall

Investigating the causes and consequences of a mud slide in Sierra Leone that killed more than a thousand people.

In August 2017, a devastating landslide in Sierra Leone, killed over a thousand people. It was a terrible blow to a country that still bears the scars of a brutal civil war that ended two decades ago and the more recent, but equally appalling, Ebola crisis, which stretched the nation's limited resources to breaking point. 

Initially, freak rains brought on by climate change were thought to be the cause, but then other stories emerged - of corruption, greed and environmental degradation, of disastrous urban expansion and unheeded laws. It became clear that the catastrophe may have been as least as much a consequence of local failings as the result of global weather events. What's more, there had been stark warnings of looming disaster for many years.