ncurses defaults (sometimes? there's a weird runtime check to detect the current ncurses setup) to installing the headers in /usr/include/ncurses (probably to be able to keep the unicode support in a distinct directory, usually /usr/include/ncursew), while most stuff will only look for ncurses headers in the root of /usr/include, not /usr/include/ncurses.
You might have to reconfigure/build/install ncurses with --includedir=/usr/include, or play with CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/include/ncurses" when building stuff
