(English) Madagascar: A song of ice and water

Désolé, cet article est seulement disponible en English.

Every year on 22 March, World Water Day is an opportunity for us to focus on water, its vital importance to everything on Earth, its quality and accessibility to people all over the world.

This year, the global theme is glaciers, which store 70 per cent of the world’s fresh water.

As well as noting the role Malagasy communities are playing in protecting this vital resource, we also note the challenges Malagasy people face accessing clean water for drinking, washing and general hygiene, the dangers resulting from those challenges, and what we and our partners are doing to help.

This may not be a sentence you were expecting to read, but Malagasy people are on the front-line of the global battle to preserve and protect the world’s glaciers.

Today (Saturday 22 March 2025) is World Water Day.

The event’s organisers have chosen glaciers as the main focus of this year’s event.

Glaciers contain almost 70 per cent of the world’s water and around two billion people around the world rely on water from glaciers, snowmelt and mountain run-off for drinking, agriculture and energy production.

But in 2023, glaciers lost more than 600 gigatons of water, the largest loss registered in 50 years (the entire period during which glacial water loss has been recorded). This alarming loss is something we do not yet know how to – or even if we can – recover or repair.

A clear cause of this loss is climate change – as carbon levels in the atmosphere increase, temperatures also increase, and glaciers melt in ever increasing volumes, flushing freshwater into the sea, where it ceases to be possible to drink, as well as disrupting ocean currents, altering weather patterns and raising sea levels.

This also raises an important point about the world in which we live.

Madagascar has zero glaciers, and does not rely on glacial water for survival, so how are Malagasy communities important to the fight to preserve them?

While Madagascar does not have glaciers, it does have rainforests: some of the world’s most fertile regions, teeming with in many cases unique life.

These are the reason that Madagascar is one of only four carbon sinks – countries which emit less carbon than they remove from the atmosphere – on the planet.

But 80 per cent of Malagasy people rely entirely on agriculture – including subsistence farming – for food and/or income. And 79.9 per cent of Malagasy people live on or below the global poverty baseline of £1.73 per day.

In a bitter irony, despite living in a country which removes carbon from the atmosphere, Madagascar is currently one of the countries worst-affected by the impacts of climate change, including droughts, flooding and extreme rainfall washing away irreplaceable fertile soil – all of which devastate crops.

All of these things – poverty, reliance on agriculture and climate change destroying crops – puts Malagasy people in direct danger of food shortage or worse. And this, unsurprisingly, can tempt those people, through no more than desire to survive, to clear areas of rainforest to access more land.

Our Resilient Forests and Livelihoods programme works to provide Malagasy people with the capacity and agency to develop and deliver climate-resilient practices and initiatives, including agro-forestry and greater farming efficiency, so that they can increase crop yields, reduce food scarcity, improve incomes and lives, and protect, nourish, grow and expand the forest.

Included in their achievements, Malagasy people are preventing the removal of areas of forests, and have helped replant hundreds of hectares of forest.

In this way, some of the world’s poorest people, with zero experience or proximity to glaciers, are standing against and fighting to prevent glacier loss all over the world.

Another, also vital, element of World Water Day’s focus is to support the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal Six: Water and sanitation for all by 2030.

It’s a matter close to our heart.

There are 31.2 million people in Madagascar.

Of those, 13.8 million don’t have access to clean water, 25.2 million don’t have a decent toilet and almost 1,800 children aged under five die each year from diarrhoea caused by dirty water and poor toilets.

We work to provide water and water infrastructure to Malagasy men, women and children, to help them avoid disease, which even if not fatal can severely disrupt children’s education and adults’ lives, as well as to make clean water easier to access.

At the Akony Avoko Bevalala centre, a shelter which provides boys aged 10-18 with shelter, care, protection and attention, the closest water source was a 15-minute walk away – problematic enough on the journey there, but especially daunting when carrying two 20 litre cans filled with water back.

The only other source of water was that in the far nearer rice fields, but this was unclean and caused scabies outbreaks, especially among the younger boys.

Last October, we installed water pipes and taps to the centre, meaning those long journeys, and the risk of disease, are at an end.

Two boys who live at the centre, Jolo and Ravo, said:

‘Today, we are relieved: the water is finally here. We no longer have to travel long distances or carry heavy loads. This changes everything for us.

‘Before, we had to walk 15 minutes to reach the nearest water point. Once we arrived, we often waited almost an hour, as this water point is owned by the community and used by many people.

‘Every day, we had to bring back at least twenty 20-litre cans to meet the needs of the centre. Each boy had to carry two cans a day, and the climb from the draw point to the centre was extremely tiring.

‘‘We sincerely thank everyone who contributed to the realisation of this project, because access to water is vital for our well-being and for the proper functioning of the centre.’

Riana Hary Andriosa, MfM’s Protecting & Enabling Vulnerable Children programme manager, said:

‘The arrival of water at the AAB center is not only a logistical victory, but a major step forward in improving the living conditions and future of these vulnerable young people.‘

Even as the men, women and children of Madagascar are fighting to help save the world’s glaciers from the impacts of climate change, they are struggling – and often becoming sick – because they themselves cannot access clean water.

We are helping to overcome this challenge, but it is something none of us should forget this World Water Day.