EISA is deploying a Technical Team for the upcoming Parliamentary Elections due to be held in Madagascar on 23 September 2007. The team will be composed of six members. The mission is expected to arrive in Antananarivo on September 16 in order to hold a series of meetings with election stakeholders, including the Madagascar Electoral Commission (CNE), political parties, CSOs and academics, ahead of election day.

Malagasy authorities have destroyed 137 houses and expect to knock down more ahead of next month's Indian Ocean Games, an official said on Tuesday. The structures were built illegally on land set aside for the August 9 to 19 competition, said Elyse Razafimahefa, a senior official in the capital, Antananarivo's, city council.

Aid agencies are scrambling to help Madagascar recover from a succession of natural disasters, feeding whole communities cut off from desperately needed food supplies and helping thousands of children get back to school.

As the sixth mayor cyclone to hit Madagascar this season tears across the northeast of the impoverished Indian ocean island, a relentless succession of natural disasters has left nearly half a million people in desperate need of humanitarian assistance.

First results from elections on the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar have showed Marc Ravalomanana, the millionaire president, is on course to win a second term. The election was the first since the political crisis in 2001-2002 which brought one of the world's poorest countries close to civil war before Ravalomanana won power.

As campaigning for December polls gets underway throughout the island, Madagascar has the opportunity to show it can hold presidential elections that work. The polls are key to Madagascar's recovery after the last election in 2001, which descended into violence that split the country.

An opposition leader has been denied entry into Madagascar to register for the December presidential election but the United Nations (UN) is confident that the country's ability to hold a credible poll remains intact. Officials closed the airport to international flights in the eastern city of Toamasina on Saturday, preventing former Deputy Prime Minister Pierrot Rajaonarivelo from returning from exile in France.

Conservationists called for urgent action to protect Africa's fragile environment on Saturday 24 June, saying it was crucial to many people's survival. Endorsed by 350 scientists, policy makers and environmentalists, the "Madagascar Declaration" said Africa's natural wealth had so far failed to improve the lives of most people on the world's poorest continent.

Tension is rising in Madagascar ahead of elections scheduled for December, after talks between the government and opposition fizzled out. In a bid to ease the political situation, President Marc Ravalomanana held talks with various parties last month, but the overture was boycotted by the main opposition coalition.

"Our biggest problem is that we have no school; none of the children can study," says Edmond Tadahy, as his five-year-old daughter clambers across his lap. "None of the villages around here have schools or teachers, except Anjinjako - they have a small school, but the parents have to pay for it." On this vast Indian Ocean island, stories like Tadahy's are common. According to the Institute for Statistics of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), just under a third of adults and youths are illiterate (these figures are an average for data collected from 2000 to 2004.

Differences in labour force attachment across gender are important to explain the extent of the gender earnings gap. However, measures of women's professional experience are particularly prone to errors given discontinuity in labour market participation. For instance, the classical Mincerian approach uses potential experience as a proxy for actual experience due to lack of appropriate data. Such biases in the estimates cannot be ignored since the returns to human capital are used in the standard decomposition techniques to measure the extent of gender-based wage discrimination.

Source: Agenda News

A UNESCO-led joint programme on basic education in Madagascar has proven extremely successful. A series of stakeholders shared their experience on the programme’s innovative methodologies and approaches on November 3 at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. High level government officials, UNDP and programme staff will provide a rich testimony on their varied experiences on this successful programme.

One of the world's biggest mining companies has been given permission to open up an enormous mine on the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar which will involve digging up some of the world's most unique forest, reports the UK Observer. The decision has outraged campaigners at Friends of the Earth, who had opposed the plans from the outset. It is all the more poignant because one of their leading directors, Andrew Lees, died 10 years ago in the same forest while investigating the controversial plans for a mine.

"We are writing on behalf of the World Association of Newspapers and the World Editors Forum, which represent 18,000 publications in 100 countries, to express our serious concern at the sentencing of journalists Rolan Rasoamaharo and James Ramarosoana to one month in jail for defamation. According to reports, on 19 April Mr Rasoamaharo, director of La Gazette de la Grande Ile, and Mr Ramarosoana, author of the article, were sentenced to one month in prison after publishing an audit report on state-owned real estate company SEIMAD. Similar charges were brought but dropped against the director of the Madagascar Tribune. Mr Rasoamaharo and Mr Ramarosoana are to appeal their sentences."

Madagascar is a country rich with weird and wonderful wildlife, plants found nowhere else in the world. There are unique orchids, trees, chameleons, frogs - hundreds of species trapped in time - which have evolved in their own peculiar ways. But Malagasy people are among the poorest on earth, the economy desperately needs a boost, and beneath the precious forests are minerals that could make the country wealthy.

Madagascar is fast losing its forest wilderness. But villagers are angered by moves to prevent them cutting down trees in recently created nature reserves. The huge Indian Ocean island is home to some 200,000 plant and animal species - three-quarters of which are found nowhere else and are the product of millions of years of separate evolution since it broke away from Africa when the continents first formed.

The World Bank has urged Madagascar to begin developing a controversial titanium mine with mining giant Rio Tinto, saying it would help alleviate poverty. Friends of the Earth say the project would dredge millions of tons of mineral sands along a 6 000ha strip to extract the mineral, devastating forests, endangering rare wildlife, and affecting 360 000 inhabitants.

Poverty and rapid population growth have driven the destruction of almost 90 percent of Madagascar’s rainforest, home to thousands of plant and animal species found nowhere else on earth. In the documentary Finding Balance, rare interviews with local women brings the links between population growth and environmental destruction into sharp focus.

A coalition of debt campaigners has welcomed a decision by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to cancel half of Madagascar's debt, but has called for a total write-off of the money owed to the two financial institutions. "The problem is Madagascar is still too poor to service the rest of its debt. We have been calling for full debt cancellation of all the poor countries which fall under the HIPC [Heavily Indebted Poor countries] initiative," Ashok Sinha, coordinator of the UK-based Jubilee Debt Campaign told IRIN.

United Nations workers and hundreds of volunteers have vaccinated more than seven million children in Madagascar against measles to prevent a potentially lethal outbreak on the giant Indian Ocean island. The month-long drive against the world's biggest vaccine-preventable killer saw trucks and planes delivering 10 million doses of the vaccine throughout the country, which is bigger than France.