The village of Antananbaobe, ten kilometers from Ambodigavo village (where we will hold our first womens cooperative sewing seminar in late September) is a beautiful village on the road to Anjanaharibe Special Reserve. Antananbaobe is one of the “greenest” villages in our Commune Rurale, surrounded by inter-cropped and forested hillsides home to bamboo lemurs, and surrounding a network of river-irrigated lowland rice paddies. The community is impressively organized and is home to two especially motivated cooperatives, a small blacksmiths association and an active womens cooperative.

As in Ambodigavo, all Antananbaobe community members are subsistence agriculturalists who rely primarily on rice farming to support their families. Rice is the staple of the Malagasy diet and large quantities are eaten three times per day.

Development agencies and environmental organizations are now promoting a more efficient method of rice cultivation developed in Madagascar that can increases crop yield by as much as 4-fold, without using chemicals or non-natural fertilizers. This new method, called SRI, encourages transplanting rice seedlings much earlier than in the conventional method, planting seedlings one-by-one in order to reduce root competition, specially regulating water in the rice field to allow the rice plants more access to oxygen, and regularly weeding paddies with hand-welded contraptions called “sarcleuses”.

By encouraging this slightly different, yet immensely more productive method, Malagasy farmers can increase their food security while decreasing their need to slash and burn rainforested hillsides to make space for often unproductive supplimental rice crops. SRI can play a key role in biodiversity conservation in Madagascar while providing economic and health benefits to Malagasy families. Folks just need to learn how to do it!

The Ambodigavo womens cooperative has 18 members, all eager to learn the SRI rice method and teach others in their community to employ it. Their proposed project, with the support of friends in the United States, is to plant an experimental one-hectare plot of SRI rice in a community-donated paddy near the center of the village.

This will involve an enormous amount of collective effort: using zebu to plow and prepare the field, hand-planting the rice, carefully controlling river-fed irrigation, hand-weeding regularly using locally welded sarcleuses (made by the Antananbaobe blacksmiths association), and hand-harvesting and processing (while these women simultaneously work their respective families’ rice fields). They are, however, very eager to try and see how an experimental single-hectare yield will compare to rice farmed using the traditional method.

It is an excellent community-initiated project and all the Antananbaobe cooperative women are grateful for the support they’ve received from friends abroad! If all goes well, the women of Antananbaobe will become ambassadors for the improved rice farming technique in this wonderful corner of Madagascar.

Trainings and planting should begin in mid-October. I’ll keep you posted on our developments!

The proud women of the Ambodigavo village sewing cooperative

The village of Ambodigavo (“At the Guava Tree�) in northeastern Madagascar’s Andapa rice farming basin (in the rural Commune where I live and teach), has a population of 200. The motivated mothers, daughters and grandmothers of Ambodigavo have formed a women’s sewing cooperative, to make their own clothing and try to generate income for their families.

These women are remarkably dedicated, but still have a lot to learn about sewing before they can produce clothing and other items for their families and for local sale.

The families of Ambodigavo support themselves through subsistence agriculture. They farm small-scale rice, beans, sugar cane, greens, coffee and vanilla. The average annual family income is 500,000 AR or $333 per year. There are 31 women in the Ambodigavo cooperative, who range in age from 18-60 years.

These women have requested assistance in organizing a two-week sewing seminar in their village. The seminar is a community-initiated idea, a project the women of Ambodigavo have wished to do for over two years now, but have not had the means to.

We’ve recently managed to pair the cooperative with many wonderful friends abroad, including two American sewing groups in Northern Virginia and Ithaca, New York!

Our sewing training should begin in September/October, and will doubtless prove a wonderful women’s empowerment project for the village!

Come and visit us!

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ENGLISH Antanetiambo Brochure
FRENCH Antanetiambo Brochure

One of my projects in this third year with Peace Corps is assisting the development of a small local cultural and ecotourism program in the village of Belaoka in northeastern Madagascar. Belaoka is situated between Marojejy National Park and Anjanaharibe-Sud Special Reserve, close to the town of Andapa.

The ten hectare locally-protected reserve of Antanetiambo is a hillside of regenerating rainforest that serves as a watershed protecting the village’s surrounding lowland rice paddies. It is managed by members of the small Association des Partenaires Ecotouristiques, with whom I also collaborate on environmental radio broadcast development, in partnership with the Commune Rurale de Belaoka-Marovato.

Visitors may enter the bamboo forest with a local guide in search of nocturnal mouse lemurs and diurnal bamboo lemur groups, learn about medicinal and practical uses of native plant species, observe the Tsimihety Malagasy lifestyle, and even learn subsistence agriculture techniques! The Belaoka community is welcoming and eager to exchange knowledge with visitors and certain proceeds go directly to the village for community development projects.

At Antanetiambo we’re working together to demonstrate that conservation pays in myriad ways!