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Restore Forests, Renew Futures in Madagascar
Double Your Impact with Earth Raise 2026
Wednesday 22nd – Wednesday 29th April 2026
As we approach Money for Madagascar’s Earth Raise 2026 fundraising week, we are letting you know what we plan to do, and what we are already doing, to protect and grow the Malagasy wilderness, and improve lives and livelihoods for the men, women and children of this beautiful island.
Today, we introduce Eric.
Earth Raise 2026 (the new name for the Big Give’s Green Match Fund) starts at 12pm (UK time) on Wednesday 22nd April. It will run for one week, closing at 12pm on Wednesday 29th April.
During this week, everything you donate through the Money for Madagascar donations page on the Big Give website (we will provide the link and donation guidance next week) will be doubled in value: your donation will be doubled by our pledgers and champion fundraiser, meaning every £20 you donate will deliver £40 to Malagasy communities.
It will also have double the impact. We are targeting a total of £60,000, which we will use to improve Malagasy people’s lives and livelihoods and to protect and expand Madagascar’s vibrant, vital wilderness, upon which we all rely.
Our work addresses the destruction of Madagascar’s forests and wilderness, upon which the world relies in this era of climate crisis, and a leading factor in its degradation and destruction: the poverty many Malagasy people face.
If deforestation in Madagascar continues at its present rate, all its forests will be gone before 2065. But more than 90 per cent of Malagasy men, women and children live on or below the global poverty baseline. Most report missing at least one meal per day.
The two are connected. Hunger and shortage drive people to remove forests in an effort to access new land, to produce more food, reducing their hunger and perhaps making a better income.
We will use what you generously donate to train Malagasy people in dynamic agro-forestry (DAF), so they can restore degraded land, increase crop yields, and reduce the need for forest clearance.
We will use it to restore wild land and reforest, recreating spaces for Malagasy plants and animals to thrive.
And we will use it to strengthen community conservation leadership, improve environmental protection and stewardship, and improve livelihoods and incomes.
We know how to do this. We are doing it already. Which brings us to Eric.
Eric Randrianontoanina, a husband and father of two, lives in Andasibe. He had to leave school in the fifth grade to earn money to help his family afford food. He was a wood-cutter producing charcoal, but trained with our partner Mitsinjo in order to change his income-generation.
He is now a nursery worker. He grows and nourishes trees, and is responsible for the Farahevitra reforestation site in Andasibe, ensuring the recreation of a balanced environment.
He says: ‘Trees are important and should not be cut. Our environment matters for us, and the plants and animals who live here. We must help them for their well-being and our own.
‘We are nursery workers. We plant trees, nourish and care for them as saplings, then we plant them so they will recreate a growing, healthy forest.
‘We also raise awareness in local communities – including our own – about forest protection, and why we should care for our environment, including that doing so can help us.’
Eric has benefitted – and helped others benefit – from information and access to new ideas and methods for plant growing, including dynamic agro-forestry, under which people grow plants as part of and beneficial to the forest, and from which they can harvest food.
This includes ‘mudball planting’ for young coffee plants, which eliminates the use of plastic, saves water, and, importantly, also significantly cuts costs and increases yields for growers.
His work has had a significant impact on him and his family: ‘One of my personal achievements through this work,’ he explains. ‘Was being able to build my own house. We all work hard here and it is good that this work is helping our area, our country, and directly helping our families in these ways.’
There is no ‘clash’ between the survival of men, women and children reliant on what they can grow, and the remote forest in which they live and upon which the global ecosystem relies. In fact, as Eric’s experience proves, caring for the forest can and does improve the lives of those carers, materially as well as spiritually.
These success stories show what can be done, and that we can do, and are doing it. But there is much more to be done.
Your donation, which will have double the impact, and will continue our work uniting conservation and development, we will be able to do it.
The slogan marking this, our 40th anniversary year, is ‘Hazo tokana tsy mba ala, Ny firaisakina no hery: One tree does not make a forest – Together we are stronger.’
With Earth Raise 2026, we can stand together, and build stronger forests.
Please share this message with friends, family and colleagues, and please save the date. Thank you!
Earth Raise 2026
Earth Raise 2026: what we will do
Reaping the fruits of the forest – DAF with MfM
Land, Lives and Livelihoods: DAF and MfM
