
Unreported World: Malawi - Treating Blind People, South Africa - Skin Bleaching, Sierra Leone - Africa's Perfect Storm
Three field reports from the Unreported World series follow reporters into stories international news usually skips. In Malawi, Ade Adepitan films medics performing fifteen-minute cataract operations that restore sight to elderly patients and to teenagers who have never seen before, working with minimal equipment against daunting odds. In South Africa, Tania Hussein investigates the rise of skin-whitening creams among young women, tracing the trend's roots partly to pressures inside the country's music industry. The final segment sends Seyi Rhodes to Regent, a hillside town outside Freetown, Sierra Leone, where a landslide on August 14, 2017 killed close to a thousand people after torrential rain hit an overcrowded slope. Rather than blaming climate change alone, Rhodes traces the disaster to unchecked construction, poverty, and government failure, and asks what it means for other fast-growing cities built the same way. Each segment runs under twenty-five minutes, shot on location with direct interviews and no reenactment.