(English) Mentoring and care for a flourishing community

Mae’n ddrwg gen i, mae’r cofnod hwn dim ond ar gael mewn English.

THOUSANDS of children, young people and adults in a growing but underserved Malagasy town are set to benefit from a facility providing education advice, training, healthcare, access to books and technology, and food.

The Ankizy Gasy Mentoring Centre, in Ambohidratrimo is set to open officially tomorrow (Saturday 1 March 2025). It has already been offering services to young people and will become a hub providing six major services designed to improve health, learning and living standards in the town.

Ambohidratrimo is just 15km from Madagascar’s capital city Antananarivo, and five km from its international airport. It is experiencing rapid population growth and urbanisation, but remains underdeveloped, lacking roads and access to water and electricity from the national supplier, Jirama.

Less than 50 per cent of the population has access to any electricity at home, while the town’s schools have limited or no access to electricity.

And Ambohidatrimo’s young people face the same challenges other Malagasy people do: 40.3 per cent (13,199,949) of Madagascar’s population is urban, and the country’s median age is 19.2 years, but education is beyond some young people’s reach, while others who do attend school face challenges related to poverty, hunger and ill health.

Almost four-fifths – 79.7 per cent – of Malagasy people live on or below the global poverty baseline of £1.73 per day, and four in ten Malagasy children do not complete even primary school education.

It is a vicious cycle, in which families are too poor to send their children to school, too poor to enable them to stay there, or too poor to help ensure they gain the best outcomes from their education, which then leads to the next generation being similarly poor and incapable of helping their own children reach their potential.

Simultaneously, in part because of an accident of birth which means they live alongside and within some of the world’s most vibrant and fertile rainforest, Malagasy young people need to be able to adapt to and mitigate climate change.

This, too, means Madagascar needs new skills and practices across all sectors. But those skills cannot be developed and used because young people struggle to make the most of, or even attend, school.

The mentoring centre, which is run by Money for Madagascar partner Ankizy Gasy, as well as Children of Madagascar and Money for Madagascar, is a two-storey building, of which construction began in late 2023, funded by the Aeolian Foundation.

Ankizy Gasy is already running mentoring services at the centre, and from Saturday (1 March) the hub will offer:

• A safe learning environment for more than 1,000 schoolchildren, university students and beneficiaries of sponsorship programmes, including educational support for young people from vulnerable families and backgrounds, who might otherwise drop out of education

• Career support, including careers fairs, site visits, internship opportunities, psychometric testing, study support, scholarships and peer support, including for young single mothers to help 50-100 people per year into training and work

• Vocational training, including in sustainable agriculture, IT, ecology, languages including English and French, tailoring, catering and hospitality, for at least 300 people per year

• A library, accessible to all, for reading and study

• A teacher training centre, with digital technology powered by solar energy, aiming to train 50-100 teachers each year

• Healthcare advice and basic treatments provided by nursing staff on-site, and referrals and sign-posting for people who need further assistance

• A showcase for renewable energy, helping Ambohidatrimo’s residents benefit not only from the solar energy at the centre, but also learn more about how solar power could help transform their home lives

The centre will also host elements of the Money for Madagascar Education for Life programme – as well as teacher training, this will include personal hygiene promotion for children, educational activities for parents, sustainable agriculture workshops, financial support for small businesses run by parents, and environmental projects using solar energy – and will provide free meals for local schoolchildren, which in some cases will be their main or even only, meal of the day.

These initiatives will reach thousands of people, and improve lives and livelihoods, incomes and the environment, for generations of the town’s community.

Find out more about our programmes, including Protecting and Enabling Vulnerable Children, and Education for Life.