Building environmental justice in a remote global biodiversity hotspot

Solutionscape

Two residents wade across a river in northeastern Madagascar, carrying goods on a pole between villages and fields.

Part of the region

Madagascar

Madagascar

Building environmental justice in a remote global biodiversity hotspot

Solutionscape

Part of the region

Madagascar

Madagascar

The Mahalevona Valley stretches from the ocean to the mountains, next to Masoala National Park, in one of the world's most biodiverse regions—home to species found nowhere else on earth. Its ecological importance sits alongside deep socioeconomic constraints: many local communities face high levels of poverty, with limited access to education, healthcare, and markets. Confined to protected-area buffer zones and with limited land for farming, younger generations in particular struggle to secure their livelihoods. Without access to land or compensation for preserving the forest, they often resort to deforestation for upland rice cultivation or cash crops such as vanilla and clove. The region's isolation creates further difficulties—limiting access to markets, infrastructure, and technical knowledge. Conservation and commodity crop production are often shaped by conflicting agendas among local and external actors.

To address these challenges, the Wyss Academy, in close collaboration with its key partner, is working to strengthen land governance and develop agricultural and non-agricultural revenue streams, including value chains for key products and services. Efforts also focus on income diversification through silk production and improving digital connectivity to reduce isolation and stimulate the regional economy.

The year 2025 marked a turning point— prompting us to pause for reflection and realignment. We refined our Theory of Change and acknowledged the crucial role that strong monitoring and learning expertise plays in evaluating our impact rigorously and efficiently. These actions set the stage for more deliberate, evidence-based actions as we move forward.

Dr. Ntsiva Andriatsitohaina
Associated Senior Researcher

Main achievements in 2025

The year 2025 was marked by both consolidation and expansion of activities, with a deliberate emphasis on partnerships, dialogue, and institutional anchoring. Engagement broadened to include private sector actors, implementing partners, and innovation-oriented organizations, building momentum around nature-positive value chains, community-based learning, and policy-relevant exchange. Stakeholder events and collaborative workshops helped actors working in the same landscape—but often in parallel—to clarify roles and coordinate more effectively.

The year also laid important groundwork for future monitoring and learning, notably through a baseline survey conducted in November 2025, providing a reference point for assessing progress and impact in the years ahead.

  • Key Changes

    • Building sustainable value chains with the private sector in the Mahalevona Valley
    • “Ivo-toerana Mirohy” as community knowledge hubs
    • Strategic alliance with the Swiss Embassy to amplify dialogue and visibility

  • visits to the community centers for skills development and access to digital tools 6814

  • beneficiaries in digital literacy, livelihood skills, governance and employability-related trainings 945

  • nature-positive jobs created throughout the established silk and vegetal fiber value chain 64

  • Building sustainable value chains with the private sector in the Mahalevona Valley

    Private sector engagement in the Mahalevona Valley deepened in 2025, with key partners including MC Ingredients (MCI), Maroa Market, and Floramad, alongside the Maison de l'Apiculture Malagasy (MAM) and startups such as SoaTech and Mot'Aratra. MCI is working with 100 bird's eye chili farmers organized under the producers' association Ravimaitso. After a year of dialogue, advocacy with local authorities, and engaging farmers ready to make the shift, Floramad committed to sourcing essential oils from responsibly harvested clove leaves.

    These engagements have strengthened producer organizations and improved market access, introducing practical innovations including product traceability, more environmentally responsible honey production, and electric mobility to improve transport in this remote context. Together, these partnerships lay the foundation for wider uptake of local value chains and sustained private sector investment in the valley's long-term development.

    Beekeepers learn how to fit a queen excluder—used to keep the queen out of honey frames—during a practical training session.

  • “Ivo-toerana Mirohy” as community knowledge hubs

    In 2025, the Ivo-toerana Mirohy community centers became fully operational as knowledge hubs. Powered by solar energy and equipped with high-speed internet, the centers provide access to online resources and AI-supported learning, with local coaches helping participants use these tools.

    The centers served young people, women, and farmers from Maroantsetra and the wider Mahalevona Valley. 390 young people benefited from digital literacy training, while 174 participants acquired practical, livelihood-oriented knowledge—ranging from cooking and handicrafts to fish farming, beekeeping, sewing, and poultry—using AI as a learning support tool. In parallel, 306 individuals participated in in-person and remote trainings on topics including entrepreneurship, environmental education, communication skills, and vocational techniques.

    As the centers mature, they offer a growing platform for community-based learning, youth employability, and sustained knowledge exchange across the valley.

    With guidance from Honorette (right), a young digital coach, participants work on their CVs using a shared laptop.

  • Strategic alliance with the Swiss Embassy to amplify dialogue and visibility

    This year, a strategic alliance with the Swiss Embassy in Madagascar took shape. The collaboration began in April with a courtesy visit to the newly appointed Swiss Ambassador. The Embassy then invited the Wyss Academy for Nature, alongside other organizations, to organize a dialogue on the Environment–Economy Nexus with conservation actors and Madagascar-based Swiss private sector representatives.

    In November 2025, the event "Voices for the Forest: A Dialogue with Madagascar's Changemakers" was hosted at the Swiss Residence, providing a platform for young Malagasy Changemakers to showcase initiatives in women's empowerment, climate-resilient livelihoods, responsible tourism, and environmental education. In December, an Ambassador-led delegation visited the Mahalevona Valley and Masoala National Park, gaining first-hand insight into on-the-ground activities.

    This alliance does more than raise visibility. It connects evidence from the field with the rooms where agendas are shaped and where private-sector actors commit. It sets a clear path for 2026: keep the dialogue policy-relevant, back it with grounded insights, and translate it into joint measures that benefit forests and communities.

    During a visit to Maroantsetra, the Swiss Ambassador to Madagascar, Stefano Toscano, meets SEPALI staff—local partners supporting conservation-based livelihood work near the Makira–Masoala landscape.

Impact Story

  • One Farmer, One Tool, Twice the Harvest

    In Fizono, a village in the Mahalevona Valley of northeastern Madagascar near Masoala National Park, rice fields lie in small pockets and tools are hard to come by. In this setting, Delien, a young farmer supporting a three-person household, faced a familiar but grinding constraint. In June 2024, he began cultivating rice on land he did not own, renting paddy fields from landowners based in Sambava, a town farther up the coast, in exchange for a share of the harvest. With only himself and his wife doing the labor, the work with just two pairs of hands was slow and exhausting. What would have helped was animal traction: zebu draft power used for plowing. However, the fee would have been 800,000 Malagasy ariary (176 USD) for one planting season, well beyond the household’s means.

    Delien’s updated plow in action in Fizono—proof that small design changes matter when tools are scarce.

Projects in this Solutionscape

Related publications

Annual Report 2025