WHO ARE WE ?
In 1996, while shooting a film in Madagascar, we discovered the island. The island's name evokes a land of plenty, with magnificent beaches, wild forests and lemurs...
Location scouting, then filming, takes several months. As the weeks went by, we discovered a country in ruins, with children begging and sleeping on the sidewalks.
Life in the bush was apocalyptic: no schools worthy of the name, no hospitals, no roads, no food... Farmers left to their own devices, with no help at all. We saw with our own eyes families eating roots!
It was impossible for us to ignore this poverty and stand idly by.
We could have written a check to Father Pedro, who is doing a tremendous job in Tananarive. But, after a long discussion with him, we realized that he couldn't welcome all the country's misery into his neighborhood. On the contrary, we had to slow down the exodus of people to the mirage that is the capital.
This is how the Ecoles du Monde association came into being, with the aim of settling the villagers on their native lands.
Combat rural exodus through :
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Education, to ensure that young people have a different future from that of their parents.
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Development aid, to offer villagers prospects for improving their daily lives
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Reforestation and maintenance of biodiversity, a unique asset for the country
Our missions
The bush has the right to education!
This is our conviction and our commitment.
We've built schools in remote areas, abandoned by all, that offered no future to their children.
Promote the development villages
Drawing on its experience, EDM has endeavored in all its villages to help local people express and take charge of their own development projects.
Handicrafts, plantations and various productions have been encouraged....
In Besely, new microcredits have recently been set up.
Participate in reforestation and sustainable development
To stem the tide of migration to the cities, it is essential to give the inhabitants of bush villages the means to improve their living conditions in the long term.
25 YEARS OF ACTIONS IN FIGURES
15
CLINICS
4
WELLS
250
400 000
TREES PLANTED
SCHOOLS
A WORD FROM THE CHAIRMAN
Charles Gassot
Dear friends,
We've just celebrated our 25th anniversary - a quarter of a century!
We've been bringing water, sanitation, gardens and education to the poorest of the poor, deep in the bush, for 25 years, and it's thanks to you that we've been able to do so so consistently.
As you know, we handed over the first 14 bush elementary school we set up in places where there were none to the Madagascan Ministry of Education.
Over the past 8 years, your support and that of our 26 partners has enabled us to develop the elementary school designed voluntarily by the architect Jean-Paul Viguier.
Year after year, we have tirelessly sought out new partners and convinced them that our work makes sense. It's a good thing they follow us today, just as you do, because donations and funding are increasingly difficult to obtain and secure.
We are now devoting all our energy to the Besely school. The crucial turning point was the installation of fiber by our partner "Telma", as this equipment now enables our teachers and students to benefit from online courses, given throughout the year, by volunteer teachers and education specialists based in France.
With our partners the ADP Foundation, the Filatex Foundation, the Luciole Foundation and the Bourgogne Franche-Comté Region, we have been able to build a college and houses for teachers.
The college was designed free of charge by architect Cyril Trétout and his team from the ANMA agency.
We mustn't forget that we're in the bush. To be able to recruit and keep good teachers, it's essential that we provide them with homes equipped with running water and electricity. The EDF Group Foundation, which understood our commitment, provided us with the energy equipment we needed to run the primary and secondary schools.
We're already working on the next stage, the construction of the technical high school. Architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte has designed a magnificent project on a pro bono basis. The question of financing inevitably arises, and we are stepping up our efforts, calling for proposals and meeting with foundations and institutions whose missions correspond to the issues we address: education, the environment, the fight against poverty through economic development...
Building and operating a technical high school in such an underprivileged region will be an eloquent signal to institutional decision-makers. We'll be showing them not only that it's possible, but also that this model can be duplicated anywhere in the world.
For the first time, a bush school will offer its pupils a complete curriculum, from kindergarten to vocational high school, and enable them to leave with a trade.
As for the training courses to be offered, we're already working on several avenues. One of them is IT training, which will be implemented in partnership with ADSI, a company that supports us. Another is training in agronomy and pharmacology, with the support of the pharmacology division of the Université de Paris Cité.
Our Écoles du Monde association is modest in size, but the actions it undertakes and the way in which it carries them out are beginning to be seen as a possible path towards concrete development in favor of the world's poorest populations. It's the work carried out by our Paris office (there are 4 of us) that is making us increasingly visible. And thanks to the press, we are able to reach potential new partners.
The battle is far from won, but the exemplarity and excellence of our courses are winning us over more and more every day. And the presence of our partners alongside us, who bring their skills to bear on the spot, creates an exceptional dynamic. Never before seen in the bush!
While the donors who support us help us to finance construction, it's your donations - so precious - that enable us to pay the running costs of this Besely school, which in a few years' time we'll be calling "Campus".
These costs increase every year with the opening of new middle school classes. We continue to serve free breakfast and lunch to all our students. So we have to finance the costs involved. Fortunately, our partner Fresh-pack generously provides us with 100 kilos of fresh fish every week.
Soon, the salaries of the teachers at our next technical high school will be added to our overheads.
I'd like to say a big thank you to all of you for following us, despite the curious and tense times we've been going through for just over two years.
All my friendship to you,