Resources / As the year ends GSF in Madagascar heats up

A year after the Global Sanitation Fund (GSF) programme was launched in Madagascar, progress is encouraging, with the triggering of some 300 villages, and a strong momentum to improve sanitation and hygiene practices.  

The GSF in Madagascar focuses on hygiene education, raising awareness, and demand creation to effect change on a national scale. The GSF supports in-country work through regional-level grants spread across eight targeted regions to maximize the Fund’s geographic reach in the country. Executed by Medical Care Development International (MCDI), an international NGO, the ultimate aim is to eliminate the practice of open defecation, to engage institutional and private actors in promoting sustainable sanitation, and to spread successful and innovative approaches in improving sanitation and hygiene. 

As 2011 is coming to an end, a closer look at progress made in Madagascar reveals ongoing and considerable progress, behaviour change and the beneficial results of effective collaboration amongst international, national and local actors. 

In Fenerive-Est, for example, the NGO ASOS is working to effect change in the Analanjirofo Region. Through GSF support, so far ASOS has triggered close to 220 villages using Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS), with 40 villages reported as Open Defecation Free (ODF) within one to three months.  In Antsirabe, which is in the southern part of the country, Caritas, a Catholic NGO, working in the Vakinankaratra Region, triggered some 40 villages and trained 40 masons, and the NGO Miarinstoa in the Ambatolampy District, within the same region, has triggered 128 villages within its targeted communes. Examples of the ripple effect keep building up.

“We are very encouraged by what we are seeing in Madagascar. We visited one large village in the Ambatolampy District, where almost every family has access to a latrine,” said Barry Jackson, Global Sanitation Fund Programme Manager at WSSCC. Miarinstoa recorded over 1,000 new latrines constructed in the first six months. 
“This is positive and clearly highlights that there are concrete results to be achieved,” he added 

Many of the villages have sought to improve their sanitation and hygiene through a number of positive measures including: sharing latrines, increased latrine coverage through building toilets, learning critical key health messages, identifying ongoing challenges and working with local community groups to find potential solutions.

To learn more about the GSF programme in Madagascar, visit here.