development

Voices of Change from Southern Madagascar

Poor people in southern Madagascar have recently had the chance to speak to a global audience about their lives and the rapid changes they are coping with. Climate change and chronic food insecurity have been compounded in recent years by a large-scale mining project run by Rio Tinto / QMM. The mine has restricted their access to fishing waters and forest, and rice production has been erratic due to changing patterns of rain fall. Families face significant challenges in adapting to this myriad of change.

A recent Andrew Lees Trust / Panos project has enabled women and men from four effected communities to talk about these changes without intermediaries. In Pushed to the Edge, they describe what has changed for them and why, and what they feel can be done to harness the positive impacts some of these changes might bring about.

Sorajy, a 50 year-old woman from Petriky, describes how she raised her children as a single mother, and how she managed to make ends meet with a combination of river bank fishing, vegetable gardening and mat weaving, activities which are now under threat. She is grateful to QMM for rehabilitating the local school and her greatest hope is that her children pass their exams and enter into a profession, so that they might have opportunities that she herself was denied. She was elected president of the adult literacy students but had to drop out, like most of her age peers, due to poor eye sight. She counts on the scholastic success of her children to bring her family out of poverty.

Fanja, 20 years old and from Saint Luce, relies primarily on mat weaving for income. She is grateful to QMM for Saint Luce’s new health centre but finds herself unable to purchase the medicines that the doctors there prescribe. Like Sorajy, Fanja is a single mother, and mat weaving does not provide her with sufficient income for such luxuries. Because access to the local forest, now under mining permit, has been blocked she can no longer collect the medicinal plants she and her children used to rely on. She reflects on her community as a whole, and feels that most of the problems stem from a lack of information and community organisation. Local lobster fishermen have few tools to combat the rich middlemen who control the lobster trade and keep prices down. Mat weavers like herself want to improve the quality of their products so they can be sold at a higher price, but they need to know what people in far away markets want to buy, and how they can change their models to meet this demand. Fanja, like Sorajy, sees professional training and basic education as the route out of poverty.

The testimonies of Sorajy, Fanja and the other participants have been published in a recent book and online, and recordings were aired on local radio. Allowing local voices to be heard in a wider forum will, at least, help bridge the communication gap which often plagues over-stretched governments and large-scale international resource projects. Lack of information and local perspective can directly contribute to policy failure, and thus this project could be an important step towards improving the impact of government, NGO and QMM activities on the lives of the people these activities are meant to assist.

More links

• ALT website page devoted to oral testimonies

© 2010 People and Development.