Wonderful viewers, welcome to another inspiring episode of Good People, Good Works. This week we feature the first in a two-part series on Azafady, an award-winning UK-based charity that strives to better the lives of the Malagasy people and the ecology of the island nation of Madagascar.

The charity was founded a little more than 10 years ago now. Why did we decide Madagascar? I think the main reason was that Madagascar received so little attention. Just to outline some of the basic facts about Madagascar, it has a population of somewhere around 20-million people, and it's a huge island. It's the world's fourth-largest island, so it's about two-and-a-half times the size of Britain.

The area's spectacularly beautiful. It has enormous potential for tourism. Pioneers are not just doing work while they're here, they're relating their experiences when they get home. It's helping to develop Madagascar's tourist industry. The people are the friendliest people in the world, they'll share their last plate of rice with you. They are the real joy of being in Madagascar; the smiles and the laughs that you share with people here.

Azafady focuses its efforts on the Anosy and Androy regions in southeastern Madagascar, as the organization feels the people in these remote places are most in need of assistance in a variety of areas. The group is working with over 80 rural communities as well as with residents of Fort Dauphin, the capital of Anosy. Mark Jacobs is the managing director of Azafady in the UK and deeply cares about the Malagasy people.

We’re quite small in the UK, we’re just three staff members. And in Madagascar we employ some 70 local staff. And our work really is about working closely with the most disempowered, the most marginalized people in the community, and helping them to improve their quality of life, to be able to live in harmony with the remaining very precious forest. And to help them to get access to the basics, through provision of schools, building wells, building pharmacies and improvement to things like sanitation infrastructure.

We're also trying to help the people that are already ill by building village pharmacies. We've built some 30, 35 pharmacies so far, meaning that people in these remote communities can get access to drugs which can save lives. We've also got a mobile doctor working with people that have got higher level illnesses such as cholera, and malaria and things like that.

So we are protecting the water, we are dealing with the causes, and we're also dealing with the symptoms of the problem after people have got ill. And hopefully in a few years’ time, we'll start to see a massive difference.

Azafady’s Project Salama focuses on rural health and sanitation with the goal of changing the lives of 80,000 plus people living in the Anosy region. Since 2002, the Madagascar government has been promoting the World Health Organization’s WASH program or Water Sanitation and Hygiene to end the illnesses that result from impure water and the lack of formal toileting facilities.

Demonstrating how much faith the government has in Azafady’s commitment to the Malagasy people, it made the group a regional coordinator for the implementation of WASH in Anosy.

Project Salama uses a three point approach to meet the challenge. First, community health promoters spread the word on public health best practices through an initiative called Participatory Hygiene and Sanitation Transformation to show people how common preventable diseases arise.

Next, the physical infrastructure to better public health is installed such as closed wells and latrines. Third, Project Salama aids the community in establishing local committees of volunteers who take responsibility for the maintenance of the infrastructure and governing their use. In addition, Azafady also has a similar program called Project Tanana Meva that focuses on building sanitary facilities for Fort Dauphin residents.

The community frankly does not have any kind of restroom facilities, and so they usually use the beach for all of their excrement needs, which really isn’t healthy for the community in general and for any visitors who come, and so what we’ve been doing is building latrines so that people don’t have to walk down to the beach.

One in 10 children presently die as a result of unclean drinking water. And just for example, access to clean drinking water is as little as three or four percent in the rural areas. So in spite of all of these very hard-hitting facts, Madagascar doesn't really hit the international agenda. You very rarely hear Madagascar in the news.

Most people who have heard of the word Madagascar will have heard it from the animated film, which of course really tells you nothing about Madagascar. (It) tells you nothing about the need for people in the international community to engage and help. And that is really why Azafady decided to work there.

Madagascar and neighboring islands are truly treasures of biodiversity with eight plant families, four bird families, and five primate families that are not found anywhere else on our planet. Part of Azafady’s mission is to conserve the precious flora and fauna of Madagascar.

We, as an organization don’t see conservation and development as separate entities, we see them very much as part of the same continuum. So the work which we do is very much about working on all levels with communities to help them to understand their environment, to help them to be able to live in harmony with their environment.

We are planting huge amounts of trees; for example, I think since January (2010) we planted somewhere around 25,000 trees. We are working on improved agricultural techniques, trying to challenge the old practices, which are causing so much deforestation. In Madagascar at the moment there is somewhere around 90% deforestation, so 90% of the forest is gone.

And then Madagascar as a whole is one of the great biodiversity centers on Earth. It’s one of the most important areas on Earth for conservation. So our stewardship and our projects are focused around working with communities sensitively within people’s culture, to help them to find alternatives to the practices which can impact negatively on the forest.

As part of its sustainable livelihood initiatives, Azafady is working to expand educational opportunities for children living in the commune of Mahatalaky in the Anosy region. Since June 2006, in partnership with the Regional Ministry of Education, Azafady has funded and built sixteen rural schools.

Last year, after spending three weeks volunteering for Azafady in Madagascar and seeing the needs of the island’s people, Reza Pakravan, a British-Iranian financial analyst, set a goal of raising sufficient funds to enable Azafady to build two more schools in southeastern Madagascar.

While I was there, I really got in touch with the reality people are facing in their day-to-day life, and how amazingly Azafady is addressing these problems. And once I got back, I just wanted to be part of it.

The school projects, which Reza has focused on, is a very high-priority project.

Getting involved with Azafady has been an absolute pleasure, and getting to know these fantastic people definitely changed my life.

To publicize the need for financial contributions to build the schoolhouses, Mr. Pakravan and a friend decided to go on a strenuous bike tour through the mountainous terrain of Nepal.

I teamed up with my friend Marco, who actually made the first donation; we decided to do a really significant challenge, and we decided to do this bike ride. The expedition was in Nepal, and we did 1,000 kilometers in 10 days, which was the toughest challenge I’d ever done in my life.

The first couple of days were fine; I was going around, I could find food. After day four, it was a real struggle to find supplies. And I have to eat 6,000 calories a day, so that’s a lot of supplies. So I bought stuff for day five and six, and stuck it into the saddle bags. On day seven, I was climbing uphill, and as I went further along, I found it more and more difficult to find supplies because nowhere was open, so no water, no food, nothing was available.

It got to the stage that I ran out of everything I had, and the next village probably was 30 miles really uphill, probably a five-hour, serious climb, but fortunately, I saw some peasants sitting in the middle of the road, which was very strange, having a huge pot of rice and some curry. They saw my face and my lips, and straightaway they invited me to join them. They were very, very kind; they shared whatever they had with me.

Reza Pakravan and his friend completed the rigorous biking journey and generated much attention for their cause in the process. Consequently enough funds were donated to construct the schools for the children.

What we do is we provide a two-classroom school, usually constructed from wood. We also provide all of the furniture, which is used inside that school. We will provide a well, so that every kid that goes to the school will have access to clean drinking water, and a girls and boys toilet, which is used by the children. And hopefully, it’s a bit of a seed project to help encourage improved sanitation in general in the village.

And then there's a teacher's house that we will build, because often the teacher will come from outside the village. And once we've built all of that, the local government agrees to actually supply a teacher. So we can walk into a village where there's been very little in the way of education infrastructure, and from the ground up, create a school hand-in-hand with the local communities, and everything that it needs to be a fully functioning school for the years to come. So it's massive for us.

Thank you Mark Jacobs, Reza Pakravan and all other people working to make Azafady’s many endeavors in the splendid nation of Madagascar successful so that the warm-hearted residents can have a better tomorrow.

For more details on Azafady, please visit: www.Madagascar.co.uk

Lively viewers, we enjoyed your blessed presence today on our program. Join us again next Sunday on Good People, Good Works for our second and concluding episode on Azafady, featuring more details on their praiseworthy initiatives and how Supreme Master Ching Hai has assisted with their efforts to build more schools. Coming up next is The World Around Us after Noteworthy News. May Divine light forever shine on our planet.