Source: Amnesty International –
Damisoa is from the Androy region in the very southern tip of Madagascar. In 2021, he and his family were forced to leave their home due to droughts worsened by climate change meaning there wasn’t enough food for them to survive there.
People displaced by famine and now living in northern Madagascar urgently need humanitarian assistance. But aid is currently almost exclusively concentrated in drought-stricken southern Madagascar.
Damisoa tells his story of displacement and survival and calls for the government to take urgent steps to address the hunger, homelessness and poor healthcare faced by him and others displaced by drought in Madagascar.
I should not have left my ancestral land, in southern Madagascar, but we were forced to leave. Famine had attacked our land.
I didn’t have much to sell to afford the journey: no goat or zebu (cattle), so we sold the cooking pots and the furniture from our home. That made us enough money for our family of 10 to leave. But it didn’t get us far.
We stopped in Toliaria and then again in Antananarivo. Each time, finding whatever work we could to raise the money for the next bus fare: gem mining, menial work, cleaning and laundry. The whole family, including my wife and my children, worked hard to raise money.
Eventually we made it to Ambondromamy, in the Boeny region, in northern Madagasacar. We were told we could earn a living in the forest by burning charcoal and growing corn and mung beans. Straight away, we began cultivating our crops and producing charcoal.
Then the authorities came. As newcomers, we were afraid: when we saw their guns, we ran away. Some of us were arrested while others were left behind.