Santi’s House

GTT is very proud of our collaboration with the University of Turin, the Groupe d’Etude et de Recherche sur les Primates de Madagascar (GERP) and Parco Natura Viva, which began in 2015. It started with something wonderfully simple: a GTT donation to provide rice for the children of Anevoka primary school in Madagascar for the whole of 2016 — and we were delighted to raise the funds to sponsor the school’s rice provisions for a further year in 2017.

The school sits in an area called Maromizaha, 150 km east of Antananarivo, which was officially recognised as a New Protected Area by the Madagascar Ministry of the Environment in 2015. That recognition is credited to a ten-year programme run by the University of Turin’s Department of Life Sciences and Systems Biology in collaboration with Parco Natura Viva, and the ongoing work involves and educates local communities in the importance of biodiversity and the protection of the many endangered species found in the area and across the country.

Towards the end of 2017, we made a new agreement with our collaborators and with LDV International to build a school house and library next to the Anevoka school buildings. Here’s why it matters: the teachers must travel twelve miles to the school every day, and when the weather is bad or a teacher is unwell, the children simply go without lessons. A building where teachers can stay overnight — and where valuable resources can be kept — makes teaching far more consistent.

The plans for the building, named Santi’s House, were agreed at the beginning of 2018, and it was completed by the end of that year. Since then, Santi’s House has been used for many purposes — not always the intended library, but often as a classroom too, which we think is a rather lovely outcome. A building that helps children learn, whatever form that takes, is exactly what we hoped for.