Forty years ago, we said yes when no one else would

This October, Money for Madagascar turns 40. We are marking it by asking the people who built this charity, and the people who haven’t yet, to help write the next chapter.

In 1986, a group of Quakers in Swansea heard about a famine in Madagascar and did the thing charities aren’t supposed to do: they said yes to a country almost no one in Britain was funding. No other organisation would take it on. They started anyway.

Forty years later, that decision is still paying out. Money for Madagascar now backs six children’s centres supporting 556 vulnerable children and young people. It stands behind 175 savings and loans groups with more than 5,317 members, over half of them women running their own household finances for the first time. Last year alone, our partners planted 134,213 endemic trees and brought 268.5 hectares of forest back to life. Every one of those projects was designed by Malagasy people, not by us. We fund it. We stay out of the way.

We run lean: in the last financial year, close to 90 pence of every pound we spent went straight to that work, not to overhead.

None of it would exist without people who decided to give, often quietly, often for years, long before anyone asked how it was going. This October, on the 21st and 22nd, we’re marking 40 years with two days of celebration. And we want as many of those people in the room, in spirit or in person, as we can.

If you’ve given to MfM before: this is us saying thank you, properly, and asking whether you’d consider standing with us for the next 40 years too. A monthly gift, even a small one, does more for an organisation like ours than a single larger one, because it’s the one kind of income we can actually plan around.

If you haven’t given before: forty years in, we’re not a startup asking you to take a chance on an idea. We’re a charity with four decades of evidence that funding Malagasy-led work, and then getting out of the way, is what actually works. The next 40 years start with whoever decides to join now.

Either way, thank you for reading this far. That’s already more attention than a lot of 40-year-old charities get.

Be part of the next 40 years