Rwanda has closed its gender gap by 80% since the 1994 genocide. How has the country done it, and should others be following its lead?

Under the leadership of President Paul Kagame, the 2003 Rwandan constitution states that at least 30% of all decision-making jobs in government or public organisations must be held by women. The constitution enshrines the right to equal education opportunities for girls and boys, the right to equal pay in public sector jobs, and the right for women to own and inherit land.

Since 2012 there has also been a drive to get more women into business, and women’s access to financial services such as bank accounts and credit has now more than doubled.

In the Rwandan capital Kigali, Maggie Mutesi reports on the experience and views of a range of women, including Chief Gender Monitor Rose Rwabuhihi and Rwanda’s first woman taxi driver Amina Umuhooza.

With the help of Dr Keetie Roelen, co director of the Centre for Social Protection at the Institute of Development Studies, the team discuss the achievements and shortcomings of Rwanda’s gender policy and whether it should be added to the My Perfect Country policy portfolio.

Fi Glover, Martha Lane Fox and Henrietta Moore from the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London are scouring the globe for more policies that actually work, and using only the functioning bits of our planet they’re attempting to build a perfect country.

Photo: Supporters of the governing Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) walk to a campaign rally in Kigali, on in July 2017. Credit: Marco Longari /AFP/Getty Images

4/4 Angela Saini is on a farm in a rural corner of Karnataka in south India, meeting the team behind Akshayakalpa – a kind of Farm in a Box. When you are on a low income, how can you possibly find a way to raise the funds you need to get into farming, or simply keep your existing farm afloat? Angela meets an entrepreneur who thinks she has found the answer. Angela heads back to Nairobi to catch up with the founder of OkHi – the app that lets you find any address in the city, which we discussed earlier in the series. How are they getting on? Finally, she meets budding agricultural entrepreneurs in Nairobi and talk to the Agriculture Minister Willy Bett.

(Photo: Cows in a field, Nyandarua County, Kenya)

3/4 OkHi is a new navigation device which runs on your mobile phone and allows you to find an address, however remote, with GPS coordinates and a photo. It should be accurate to within ten metres and copes without the usual massive infrastructure changes required by sat nav systems. Just outside Bengaluru in India, we take a look at the problems of getting access to banking services in remote communities and the solution being offered by a new company called Sub-K, and their human ATMs.

Finally, Angela calls in again on the creators of BRCK internet to learn about their major ambitions for the future.

Image: Wes Chege, founder of OkHi, Credit: Whistledown

2/4 A Kenyan company is planning to bring reliable stable internet and rugged tablets to remote schools with the help of BRCK, a solution to internet problems in the shape of a brick. Part two of four. In the northern Indian state of Assam, people have the lowest access to good quality eye care in the whole of India – 18% of all cataracts happen in this one state. ERC Eyecare has a business solution aimed at changing all that. We also return to visit the stethoscope creators from last week’s episode. Things have moved on for the company Taal and it is now trying to drum up business – how are sales going?

(Photo: Boy looks up from a Kio Kit tablet used in a school in Kenya)

The scientist running the Square Kilometre Array, the world's biggest telescope. Episode five of five.

The telescope's antennae spiral across the African continent. In the remote North Karoo town of Carnarvon in South Africa, the next generation of astronomers is training to run this major telescope facility.

(Photo: South Africa’s Karoo-based KAT-7 radio telescope array are pictured at sunset at The Square Kilometre Array. Credit: Alexander Joe/AFP)

How do young people in Sierra Leone cope faced with staggering rates of youth unemployment of over 50%? Umaru Fofana talks to young people in the capital, Freetown, as they struggle to make a living. He meets the young men who look after graves in the hopes of getting a handout from grieving relatives, and a young woman who was asked for sexual favours in return for employment. And he asks whether the education system is really preparing his young fellow countrymen for the world of work.

(Image: Young people in a cemetery in Freetown, Credit: BBC)

The struggle to get a good education, in an overpopulated school system.

With a median age of under 16 years old, Uganda is one of the most youthful countries in the world, but the sheer number of young people means that many struggle to get a good education.

A disturbing number are entirely unschooled, or have dropped out of class due to poverty or for other reasons. Others are impressive, with their determination to succeed, even in difficult circumstances.

The BBC’s Alan Kasujja travels back to the country of his birth to meet young people at various stages of learning.

Image: A boy at a desk in a Ugandan school, Credit: AFP/Getty Images

Tunisia comes under the spotlight, because it is rewriting the rules about what women can and can’t do in an Islamic country. Should it be a role model for its Muslim neighbours? Women have more rights in Tunisia than in any other Islamic country. Since independence in 1956, the Code of Personal Status banned polygamy, gave women almost the same rights in law as men - the freedom to divorce them - and the right to be educated. Following this came the right to vote, stand for office, set up a business, demand equal pay, and the right to an abortion eight years before American women won their right to choose. But has society kept pace with these advances in the law? A recent report indicating that 53% of Tunisian women experience violent attacks in their lifetime suggests legal equality is only part of the story. Based on the testimonies and experience of women (and some men) recorded in Tunisia, including rapper Boutheina ‘Medusa’ El Alouadi and Sayida Ounissi, deputy minister for employment, the team debate whether Tunisia’s ‘state feminism’ joins the My Perfect Country portfolio with the help of Dina Mansour-Ille from the Institute for Overseas Development.

(Photo: Tunisian women, one (L) wearing a 'burkini', at Ghar El Melh beach near Bizerte, north-east of Tunis. Credit: Fethi Belaid/AFP/Getty Images)

The anti-government protests that began in the Arab world in 2010 triggered division between the religious scholars of Islam’s largest branch – the traditional Sunnis. Some of the most senior Sunni scholars in the world held fast to the idea that revolution, and even simple protest, was forbidden in Islam. Others decided to back armed groups in Syria, though not the global jihadists of al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Presenter Safa Al Ahmad travels to Egypt to meet Dr Abbas Shouman, one of the most senior scholars at Islam’s most famous seat of learning, Al Azhar University. She also tells the story of Sheikh Ramadan al-Bouti, a famous Syrian Islamic scholar whose stance on the uprisings cost him his life.

(Photo: Anti-Government protesters in Cairo. Credit: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

What options do people in Ghana have when a person suffers mental illness? In this religious country, most people seek out spiritual interpretations or traditional methods of healing. Despite there being only 18 trained psychiatrists in the whole of Ghana, advocates of Western-style practices have been pushing for the use of medication and the human rights of the mentally ill. In this final programme of a four-part series, Christopher Harding asks whether spiritual and biological interpretations and treatments for mental illness can ever get along.

(Photo: A street in Ghana)

If we think of William Shakespeare as exclusively English, we should think again. People around the world have adopted his work and made it something that speaks to their own culture. Writer and academic Nadia Davids takes us to Cape Town and Johannesburg to hear how Shakespeare has played an important role in the politics of a troubled country, and how he still matters in post-Apartheid South Africa.

(Photo: A man carries a volume of Shakespeare's complete works. Credit: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images)

Kevin Connolly travels to Morocco, which sees itself as a beacon of moderate Islam, to visit the institute for training imams, which has been set up to create a new generation of Islamic teachers and leaders from the West African states of Nigeria, Mali and Guinea. They are being prepared to fight on the front line of a battle of ideas and being equipped to take on the teachings of extremists who support the so-called Islamic State, both online and face-to-face in their own mosques. We ask whether mainstream and establishment political and religious organisations are likely to have the technical know-how and the presentational skills to compete with the slick video processing and focussed messaging of IS.

Kevin also travels to Tunisia, which five years ago was the cradle of the Arab Spring. It is the ideal vantage point to ask whether the political and cultural stagnation of the decades before the Arab Spring helped to create the conditions for the rise of IS. We assess whether a lack of prosperity and hope is driving young men into the arms of extremist organisations. If the main driver of the rise of IS was a long accumulation of economic and political failures does that mean a problem that took decades to create might take decades to fix?

(Photo: Young Imams from West Africa learning how to combat extremism)

Fi Glover looks at how communities in Uganda have revolutionised the justice system by taking matters into their own hands.

The complexity of the law system in Uganda can be a tough one to follow – and causes particular difficulties for its residents. Solving that problem are the Barefoot Lawyers. In 2012, a technically competent group of legal experts began providing legal advice through social media to anyone who requested it. And it is now an award-winning, non-profit social enterprise assisting 300,000 people every month and answering around 50 enquiries per day. A particular achievement came in winning a sexual assault case for a twelve-year-old girl.

Our local reporter delves into the inner workings of the legal group to hear why they wanted to help and how they have made it work. They hear from the individuals whose lives have been changed as a result – as well as how the country’s official legal system are responding to the group.

Is a DIY law system the basis for a perfect country? Presenter Fi Glover, entrepreneur Martha Lane Fox, professor Henrietta Moore of the Institute for Global prosperity and special studio guests – give their verdict.

(Photo: Gerald Abila, the Managing Director of Barefoot Lawyers, at his office in Kampala. Credit: Isaac Kasamani/AFP/Getty Images)

The first episode focuses on Nigeria, where migration caused by desertification is leading to bloodshed as cattle herders move south from their traditional routes and into conflict with settled farmers. Meanwhile, increasingly intense rainfall in southern Nigeria causes flooding and creates enormous gulleys which are swallowing houses, farmland and even schools. Presented by Ugochi Oluigbo - a business and environment correspondent and news anchor for TVC News in Nigeria – the programme asks how far Nigerians can afford to take action over global matters like climate change. Yet somehow the country has to adapt. Ugochi explores how climate change is making an impact on women in rural Nigeria. She also discovers how young people in Nigeria are engaging with the issue. (Image: Ugochi Oluigbo and Prof. Damian Asawalam examine an erosion gulley in Imo State, Nigeria. Credit: BBC)

Aleks Krotoski returns with a new series of explorations of our digital world.

In the first in the series Aleks looks at how different cultures are preserving their identity in the face of the homogenising effects of technology.

There's a fear that the digital world will make us all the same. But that doesn't seem that well founded if you look at how widely differing cultures are using technology to express their identity and values. We look at the music sharing culture of Mali in West Africa as explored by musicologist Chris Kirkley and hear from the vibrant and intoxicating atmosphere of the mobile phone music market in Mali's capital Bamako. Back in the UK we look at the interesting way immigrant communities maintain their cultural ties through technology and the unexpected effect this has on the growth of immigrant communities.

Aleks also talks to explorer in residence Robin Hanbury-Tenison about his thoughts on how technology might be undermining cultures. Does he see the spread of digital as a new form of cultural imperialism?

Producer Peter McManus

Other areas of the digital world to be explored in this series include:

How opinion and influence spread in a digital world

What all this new technology means for how we learn?

Do we always know what technology is for and ultimately what it wants?

Has the digital world changed our perceptions and discussions of death?

Sue MacGregor presents the series which reunites a group of people intimately involved in a moment of modern history.

Sue gathers together the core negotiators and key campaigners involved in the secret talks which ultimately led to the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990 and the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa.

She is joined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who led the Free Mandela Campaign throughout the 1980s; Dr Niel Barnard, who was the head of South Africa's National Intelligence Service and who had dozens of clandestine meetings with Mandela; Professor Willie Esterhuyse, an Afrikaner academic who liaised between the government and the ANC; Aziz Pahad, who was a core member of the ANC and led many of its delegations; former President Thabo Mbeki, who was a lead negotiator for the ANC; and journalist and political commentator Allister Sparks, who chronicled the negotiations in a revealing book.

Former President FW de Klerk also contributes to the programme, describing the surprise that he and other cabinet figures felt when they learnt of the years of secret meetings.

A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4.

Sue MacGregor presents the series which reunites a group of people intimately involved in a moment of modern history.

In Ethiopia, close to eight million people became famine victims during the drought of 1984, and over one million died. The international relief effort that followed was the largest ever mounted, culminating in the Live Aid concert in 1985.

Reporter Michael Buerk, nurse Claire Bertschinger, former head of Oxfam Hugh Goyder, Major Dawit Wolde Giorgis of the Ethiopian relief effort and Sir Brian Barder, Ambassador to Ethiopia at the time, join Sue to recall the events.

A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4.

Sue MacGregor goes to Johannesburg to reunite a group of former political prisoners who were incarcerated on Robben Island when Nelson Mandela was there throughout the 1960s and 70s. Robben Island was a world of chains and torture during South Africa's darkest apartheid years. But it also became a place where many of the country's future leaders learnt the skills which would later bring them to power. We hear the extraordinary stories of five former prisoners.