Unreported World - Season 17 / Year 2016

Reporter Marcel Theroux and director Victoria Bell are in Malaysia, where the government has declared transgender people to be enemies of Islam. There they meet the Trans women who are forced to live in what human rights groups say is one of the worst places in the world to be transgender and accompany the country's religious police as they crackdown on anything considered ‘un-Islamic'.

Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Patrick Wells travel to Venezuela, where they are joined by a family's frantic door-to-door search for medicines for their desperately ill daughter. This is one of the thousands of families who are affected by the shortage of drugs and medical equipment across the country. The episode visits a hospital lacking items as basic as antibiotics, and if doctors decide to speak out they are labelled anti-revolutionaries. The show will reveal how one of the world's biggest oil producers has been crippled by an economic disaster.

Reporter Fazeelat Aslam and director Karim Shah reveal how thousands of families living in Pakistan's richest city, Karachi, are suffering from chronic water shortages as a result of climate change, mismanagement, corrupt officials and criminal gangs. Their eye-opening report shows how drastic the situation has become, with families who are running out of supplies sometimes having to spend half their salary buying water illegally from criminals, or wait up night after night to see if community water taps will be turned on for a couple of hours.

Abigail Austen is a former Parachute Regiment officer who in 2007 became the first British army officer to change her gender, before serving for four years alongside the US Army in Afghanistan. Now, together with director Will West, she returns to the battlefield at the invitation of her former Afghan colleagues. For this shocking edition of Unreported World, Austen and West have secured unique and extraordinary access to a turning point in the battle against Isis and the Taliban across Helmand and Kandahar provinces, and are the first western television crew to revisit Camp Bastion since the British army withdrew. Following the end of coalition combat operations at the close of 2014, Afghans have been leading the fight against Isis and a resurgent Taliban. In 2015, the Afghan army has lost ten times more soldiers than the British lost in 15 years.

Reporter Seyi Rhodes and director Simon Rawles visit America's murder capital - Chicago - where someone is shot every three hours. Black-on-black deaths in the first two months of the year are double what they were last year. The team are guided around the most violent neighbourhoods by volunteer ex-gang members who risk their lives as they try to halt the vicious cycle of violence caused by revenge killings. Chicago is where Obama started his political career, but in his final Presidential year, his backyard is still plagued by violence, and there's less financial assistance to help deal with it. While few people blame Obama for that, many black people here feel there's less hope for the future than there ever has been.

Krishan Guru-Murthy travels to Israel to reveal how tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors are spending their final days living in poverty, struggling to afford basics such as food and heating, despite the German government paying around 90 billion dollars since the end of the World War II in reparations linked to Holocaust survivors across the world. There are about half a million survivors, some 200,000 living in Israel, and compared with the wider population of elderly people, Holocaust survivors are more likely to live in poverty. Many are dependent on help from volunteers, and the suicide rate among survivors is three times that of the wider old-age population. Since shortly after World War II, the German government has paid billions of dollars to an international body, the Claims Conference, which uses the money to help survivors across the world.

Monday 2 May 2016 is the World Anti-Doping Agency deadline for Kenyan athletics to put its house in order. In this Unreported World, which transmits three days before that critical date, Ade Adepitan travels to Kenya to hear allegations of continued doping and corruption. Kenyan long-distance runners often dominate at the Olympics, at World Championships and on the professional marathon circuit. As Adepitan says, 'Running to Kenyans is like football to Brazilians: they absolutely love it.' But Adepitan finds Kenyan athletics in crisis. Since 2012 more than 40 athletes have failed doping tests. The International Association of Athletics Federations, run by Sebastian Coe, has suspended the CEO of Athletics Kenya as a result of allegations - which he denies - that he's requested bribes from athletes to suppress positive doping results. The World Anti-Doping Agency has given Kenya a succession of deadlines to show it's tackling doping, all of which have been missed.

Unreported World visits the Islamic Republic of Iran for the first time, to take a rare look at the reality of life for young Iranians. With nearly half of 18 to 35-year-olds single, the country is in the midst of a marriage crisis. In response, the government has set up an official online matchmaking site. But, as reporter Shaunagh Connaire and director Adam Patterson discover, behind this new website is an army of traditional matchmakers fielding calls from mothers in Tehran who want to find spouses for their sons and daughters. Tehran brims with contradictions. Many young Iranians are shunning marriage and enjoying newly popular ways to meet people, such as Instagram. But it's hard to combine the search for love, commitment to the rules of Islam, and respect for the traditions the older generation think are important. No wonder so many young Iranians find it easier to stay single.

Channel 4's multi-award winning Unreported World returns with a powerful new episode from Yemen revealing the catastrophic effect of the Saudi-led coalition's bombing campaign, which is being carried out using British-supplied weapons. The bombing, together with a naval blockade on Yemen's major port, has resulted in a humanitarian emergency threatening millions with starvation. Reporter Krishnan Guru-Murthy and director Patrick Wells are the first international crew to film in Hodeidah port, which is critical to Yemen's food imports and has been disabled by bombing.

Reporter Marcel Theroux and director Daniel Bogado travel to India for a heart-warming report on new matchmaking schemes and events being set up by people with disabilities to help others like them find a husband or wife. Marriage is a national obsession in India, and Unreported World meets the suitors battling prejudice about their disabilities while also navigating the complexities of caste, religion and parents' expectations.

Among the million-plus refugees in Germany are tens of thousands who've fled Middle Eastern countries where being gay can get you killed. Reporter Shaunagh Connaire and director Rebecca Kenna spend time with three such refugees, and discover that gay refugees in the refugee camps and shelters of Berlin and Cologne face violent attacks and abuse from fellow refugees and migrants, with the hatred and dangers they faced in the Middle East following them to Germany, and with the attacks also feeding into the wider political debate about the challenges of assimilating refugees without compromising German values.

Ade Adepitan investigates the legacy of a toxic herbicide dropped by US forces during the Vietnam War, which some doctors believe is causing health problems in a new generation of children

Malaysian Borneo's beautiful coral reefs face environmental disaster as local fishermen resort to drastic, destructive fishing methods in order to survive, including using explosives or sodium cyanide

Seyi Rhodes gains access to one of the most notorious prisons on Earth: Haiti's National Penitentiary, where 80% of inmates have been locked up without being convicted of any crime.

Reporter Tania Rashid and director Simon Rawles are in South Africa to investigate why there is such a demand for skin bleaching products in the Rainbow Nation. The government has passed strict laws to protect people from creams containing potentially dangerous chemicals which can lead to serious health complications, but as Unreported World reveals, many are still on sale widely and endorsed by celebrities. A recent study found an incredible one in three women in South Africa use skin-bleaching creams, and there are more than 500 different products for sale. In downtown Johannesburg the products are everywhere - despite the ban on any product selling itself as skin-lightening or whitening.

School is supposed to be a sanctuary for children to grow and learn in safety, but millions of girls across Africa are being manipulated, threatened and sexually abused by those who are supposed to be looking after them: their teachers. Reporter Kiki King and director Karim Shah visit Mozambique to investigate the disturbing phenomenon known as 'sex for grades', where teachers force schoolgirls to have sex with them in return for good grades, or their deserved grades. The Mozambican Ministry of Education found that 70% of schoolgirls are either facing this kind of harassment or witnessing it.