Wales & the World
Madagascar: Prayers Required.
October 2011 will see a group representing the National Synod of Wales visiting the Reformed Church in Madagascar (FJKM) primarily to demonstrate support to our partner church through the Global Partners programme of the URC , but also to see how our two churches might develop the link, following a turbulent time for the Church in Madagascar.
We need your prayers for this visit. For further details please contact Linda Elliott email
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In the meantime...more recent news
Much of Madagascar suffers poverty and unemployment, and the FJKM is seeking to respond to these problems. It runs 450 schools and recently began a project to fight bribery, HIV/AIDS and poverty.
MADAGASCAR: Raw sewage kills
Photo: Guy Oliver/IRIN
Clothes drying on the banks of the polluted Ikopa River in Antananarivo
ANTANANARIVO, 10 August 2011 (IRIN) - About a third of Madagascar’s 20 million people do not have access to water for washing and most of the rest share unsanitary toilet facilities, according to a July 2011 World Bank Water and Sanitation Programme (WSP) report. The threat of diarrhoea and other diseases is particularly acute in some of the poorer suburbs of the capital Antananarivo.
“There is no formal waste disposal for the moment in Antananarivo,” Sylvie Ramanantsoa, a representative from Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor in Madagascar, told IRIN, and raw sewerage tends to end up downstream in the Ikopa river, the country’s second largest.
The problem was exacerbated by the city’s water table being about one metre below the surface, which makes waste treatment “a big public health issue”, she said.
In April 2011, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reporteda worrying rise in pneumonic plague - spread by fleas carried on rodents and linked to poor sanitation - in Antananarivo and in the town of Talatavolonondry, 27km to the north: The Health Ministry reported more than 310 cases of plague and 49 deaths by the end of March. UNICEF responded with a mass disinfection campaign that targeted more than 28,000 families in the most exposed areas of the capital and surrounding towns. More information : http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=93471