building. UNICEF had asked our team to build the capacity of UA faculty and postgraduate students to conduct social research. We knew how to design a study, do the data analysis, and write the report, but we knew little about Madagascar, its culture and turbulent history, or how our Malagasy colleagues regarded research. Rather than writing us off as the latest group of foreign academics to show up, run around the country, and leave without learning anything, they couched their critique in the shared language of theory. Their priority for the workshop was not to draft questionnaires but to build an equal, trusting research partnership. Capacity building goes both ways.
A Marriage of Convenience
It had been an arranged match with UA, without even a blind date. In the bidding process, we worried that our proposal would not make the cut because of our modest French-language skills. My recent experiences were at holiday parties at my sister’s home in the Dordogne region of France, where the conversation usually focused on wine, food, plumbing, and knee replacements, not sampling, focus groups, or multivariate analysis. A few months later, we learned we had been awarded the contract. It was time to pull out the maps, bone up on French research phrases, and get to know our academic partner in what UNICEF was grandly calling the “international research consortium.”
Madagascar’s development challenges are daunting. The country has long languished in the “low” category on the UN Human Development Index for health, education, and income levels. Coups and political instability have scared away donors and foreign investors. Three-quarters of households live on less than $2 per day and over one-third are classified as food insecure. The maternal mortality rate has been rising and child vaccination rates declining. Many households lack access to safe water, and open defecation is common. Only three out of ten children who begin primary school complete the cycle. Child marriage is prevalent, with close to half the female population aged fifteen to forty-nine married before eighteen years of age. Sexual exploitation and violence against children are major concerns. Almost every year, the country experiences cyclones and floods on the east coast, and sometimes drought in the south.
UNICEF had stacks of demographic data—tables, line graphs, bar graphs, and pie charts presented in glossy reports and PowerPoints complete with stock images of happy children in classrooms, women engaged in ecofriendly, income-generating craft cooperatives, and villagers sitting under trees earnestly debating local issues. The data were descriptive and demographic—how many (or what percentage) of urban or rural children in which family income bracket had (or had not) had all their shots, completed the primary school cycle, or met a global nutrition standard. The statistics were listed by year to indicate possible trends, and by region for comparison. What they did not tell us was the why—the reasons people believed and did (or did not) do something. Or, if they believed in something, such as keeping children in school, why they did not do it in practice. Why did women give birth at home? Why were girls married off in their teens? Why did people think water from a river was purer than water from a tap? Were the barriers to better health, nutrition, sanitation, and education the result of culture or other factors? Who influences attitudes and behaviors—clan leaders, traditional healers, midwives, mothers-in-law, or radio broadcasts? Working with UA, our task was to design and undertake research on knowledge, attitudes, and practices, or, in bureaucratic shorthand, a KAP study.
The UA campus sits on a ridge in Tana, with commanding views across the highlands. Founded in 1955, it’s the country’s leading institution, with master’s and PhD programs and links with French and Western universities. It is also, like the education system in general, woefully underfunded. Faculty pay is low and working conditions are difficult. The red-brick and concrete buildings, most dating from the 1960s and 1970s, have cracks in the walls; inside, paint peels from the plaster and classrooms with wooden desks and chalkboards line dimly lit corridors. Power cuts are frequent, and the water supply unreliable; on a day when we discussed how to phrase questions about hand washing, we could not wash our hands because there was no water in the building. UA reminded me of the not-so-genteel decay of universities in Central Asia that I wrote about in Postcards from Stanland. The only saving grace is that it never gets too cold in Madagascar, so you don’t have to wear an overcoat, hat, and gloves to teach.
Although UA was paid for the research, and although being part of an international research consortium may have a certain cachet, the strongest motivation for the faculty and postgraduate students was the research experience they would gain. Under our contract, we were supposed to build capacity at the same time as we conducted the study. Balancing the two tasks and staying on schedule and on budget proved challenging.
Who Are the Vazaha?
The first Malagasy word I learned was vazaha. Translated literally, it means “foreigner,” and it aptly described the members of our multinational team—from the United States, the UK, South Africa, France, and Nepal. At the lodge in Andasibe National Park, there were good-natured jests about throwing the vazaha into the river to feed the crocodiles. But the banter suggested deeper social rifts. The word vazaha is also a disparaging term for a person of higher economic, social, or political status—an outsider, a government official, or an aid worker in a SUV.
Most faculty and postgraduate students at UA are Merina. If the research study had been conducted in the central highlands, where Merina form the largest percentage of the population, there would have been few barriers to data collection. However, the three regions selected by UNICEF were all coastal—two (Anosy and Atsimo Andrefana) in the south, and one (Analanjirofo) in the northeast. The researchers would be working in areas where people were mostly of African descent, where the cultural terrain, including the dialect, was unfamiliar.
The major barrier to development in Madagascar is poor infrastructure. On the maps, the Routes Nationales (RNs) are confidently marked in solid red, suggesting adequate connections between population centers. But just a few miles outside Tana, vehicles slow down to dodge the potholes or mudslides. In the south, some RNs are little more than dirt roads. During the cyclone season in Analanjirofo, which is crisscrossed by several rivers, travel is difficult as floods sweep away roads and bridges. We had used geographic and economic criteria to classify communities into four types: interior, subcoastal, coastal, and urban. Some interior communities were two days by zebu cart from the main dirt road; to include them would have lengthened the project and strained the budget, so we had to compromise.
Most people in southern Madagascar depend on subsistence agriculture or fishing. Access to health services and schools is poor. The government is resented for taxing and exploiting natural resources without giving back. The view from the capital is that “parts of the south are ungoverned, and parts may be ungovernable,” said Luke. The army, police, and even health workers venture into the so-called zones rouges (red zones) at their peril. Local people, according to Luke, see it differently, maintaining that their own social systems and norms preserve order. They are naturally suspicious of outsiders who ask about living conditions and household income (even if they also ask about vaccinations). Are they really university researchers, or are they gathering data for the tax agency?
To their credit, the UA researchers worked hard to build trust in the communities where they did interviews, focus group discussions, and observations. But they faced research fatigue. People have seen data collectors come and go and have not seen any benefits. Why should the latest group of researchers with their notebooks and audio recorders be any different? Community members will not turn away researchers, but their answers, according to Luke, may be “terse, evasive . . . politely subversive.” During a later workshop, one team reported that people in Mahavatse, a low-income community of fishermen, small traders, and rickshaw drivers in the south, were reluctant to talk to them. One reason was that as Merina “we looked different—some people said we were vazaha.”
Because of its relative isolation and ethnic diversity, Madagascar has been a happy hunting ground for anthropologists. In a study commissioned by UNICEF, the depressingly titled “The South: Cemetery of Projects?” the authors compiled sixteen single-spaced pages of books,
