Population Health Environment Approach in Madagascar

Summary

The project aims to scale up previous population health environment (PHE) experience in Madagascar, in order to influence the support of sustainable livelihoods of communities around conservation zones.

It seeks to raise awareness both inside and outside WWF and build synergy between all stakeholders.

Background

During the last 20 years, Madagascar has implemented a 3 phased environmental programme, in which WWF has played a key role. It is now about to draw up a new strategy for the next phase.

In spite of tremendous achievements and progress, conservation works in Madagascar is today more challenging than ever, as it deals with critical threats to biodiversity together with extreme poverty of large numbers of its population. The poverty of the population must be effectively addressed to allow them to be effectively engaged in the sustainable use and conservation of natural resources.

WWF and other conservation NGOs have endeavoured to address this by piloting field projects using an integrated population-health-environment approach. Lessons learnt from th is approach now need to be valued for scaling up at regional and national levels.

Main risks the project could face are the Malagasy political crisis and its potential impacts.

Objectives

In collaboration with other national and international organizations, the project will support the creation of a sustainable PHE network as a platform of organizations for the coordination of the following activities:
- communication
- training
- learning from field implementation of integrated activities including health, education, wealth, empowerment, and conservation.

The project will help the development of at least one new PHE project

Solution

The ambition of the project is to scale-up and promote the PHE approach as a tool for strengthening synergy between all stakeholders (inside/outside WWF) at all levels for the support of sustainable livelihoods of communities and sustainable biodiversity conservation.