Dr Peter Mugyenyi runs one of Africa’s largest HIV medical research institutes, the Joint Clinical Research Centre in Kampala, which he helped to found in the early years of Uganda’s AIDS epidemic. Uganda was the first African country in which AIDS was identified.

Peter explains the realities of HIV treatment in Ugandan clinics today, a decade after effective drugs against the virus started to become more widely available in African countries. Life prospects for hundreds of thousands of Ugandans are much better than they were. Yet an estimated 40% of adults with HIV are not receiving any treatment.

The proportion of untreated infected children is even higher. In conversations with Ugandans who are living with HIV, fellow medics and health workers, activists and government representatives, Peter Mugyenyi explores the successes, failures and challenges in getting the best possible treatment to every Ugandan who needs it. That ambition is also a vital part of preventing the continuing transmission of the virus in African countries.

(Photo: Dr Peter Mugyenyi and staff at Butolo Anti-retroviral Therapy Clinic, Uganda. Credit: Andrew Luck-Baker)

Claudia Hammond exposes a hidden problem which occurs before life has even begun. Nosiphiwo was ostracised by her husband’s family in South Africa after years of trying, in vain, for a baby. Stories like Nosiphiwo’s, of social stigma and even physical abuse and destitution, are common in low-income countries, where most of the millions of infertile women in the world reside. While programmes tackle the causes of infertility, such as preventing and treating sexually transmitted infections, calls to provide affordable fertility services have been overlooked by agencies which tend to focus on the problem of over population.

Claudia visits Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town where infertility treatment is being offered at a fraction of the cost of private clinics. Programme Director, Dr Matsaseng, is pioneering differing ways to keep costs down, from using cheaper medications in smaller amounts, to taking on the jobs of several staff himself, texting and supporting patients through each stage of their cycle to co-ordinate their treatments.

The next step is to find a way to take low-cost infertility treatment to rural areas. But this requires a laboratory. The Walking Egg Project, a shoe-box sized portable laboratory for performing IVF, could provide the answer. By the start of 2014, sixteen babies had been born using the system and the team in South Africa now hope to trial it at the hospital.

If you have a mental health problem, where you live in the world makes a big difference to the care you receive. In many lower and middle income countries, three-quarters of people with mental health problems don’t have access to mainstream mental health services. Even in wealthier, developed countries, the figure is close to 50%.

Claudia Hammond investigates some of the alternatives that occupy this ‘treatment gap’.

Psychiatrist Dr Monique Mutheru is one of just 25 psychiatrists in Kenya. In the absence of services to meet the mental health needs of Kenyans, traditional healers and witchdoctors play a crucial role in diagnosing and treating them. Claudia examines a programme which brings health workers and traditional healers together. It provides training for traditional healers to refer their severely ill patients to the clinic and avoid harmful practices that some healers carry out, such as lobotomy and bloodletting.

Even in developed countries like the United Kingdom, where mental health services are freely available, some people with mental health problems feel that the treatments do not help. The Hearing Voices Network provides support to ‘voice hearers’, through support groups, helping them to manage and engage with the voices that trouble them.

The wild Hamadryas baboons of Ethiopia have a friend in biologist Mat Pines. They even pick the nits from his hair. He's been studying and living with them for five years in the remote and arid Awash National Park. Now in Mat's final year, we follow the fortunes of his favourite baboon, Critical, as he tries to find a family and fend off his aggressive male rivals.

But the local gun-toting Afar tribe have a traditional hatred of the baboons. Before Mat leaves, he hopes to broker a peace between the baboons and the tribe.