Celebrate Money for Madagascar’s 40th anniversary at the Ny Ako concert. Capel y Nant, Clydach, Saturday 11 July 2026.

In 1986, a woman from Swansea named Barbara read about a famine in Madagascar and could not let it go. She wrote to every major charity she could find, asking them to act. One by one, they said no. So Barbara made a different choice: if nobody else was going to do something, she would. With the support of the Swansea Quaker Meeting, she founded Money for Madagascar.

Forty years later, her decision has grown into something she could never have built alone, and neither could we. From the very start, MfM has held one belief: Malagasy people have the solutions to Madagascar’s challenges. Our job is to back them.

This July, we celebrate four decades of that belief in song. Ny Ako, whose name means “the echo” in Malagasy, are singers and dancers who have taken leave from their jobs at home to share the music of Madagascar across Europe. They perform at Capel y Nant in Clydach, and you are invited. The concert is free. What it celebrates is 40 years of progress made by Malagasy hands.

Here is what that partnership looks like today

Across eight community-run centres near Antananarivo, nearly 2,000 children are growing up safe and in school. 92% of the young people in our partner homes are now in full-time education or training, sitting exams, learning trades, and choosing their own futures.

In the forests of Andasibe live the Indri, the largest lemurs on Earth, whose haunting song a young David Attenborough first recorded for the world in 1960. More than sixty years on, Malagasy foresters are working to make sure that song is never silenced. In a single year, local teams planted 134,213 native trees. In the Melaky region, the women of the FIVEMI cooperative tend over 150,000 more, restoring the land their families depend on.

In 2016, after filming that work in Andasibe-Mantadia, Sir David Attenborough sent MfM these words:

Sir David Attenborough, December 2016

In village schools, communities run 19 canteens serving more than 6,000 hot meals a day, so children can learn on a full stomach. And through 175 savings and loans groups, over 5,000 members, most of them women, are pooling their own money, backing their own businesses, and building their way out of poverty on their own terms.

None of this is charity done to Madagascar. It is Malagasy people leading, and a Welsh community that has stood beside them for 40 years. Your gift goes straight to where it changes the most lives: into the classrooms, the school canteens, the forests and the family businesses that Malagasy communities are building every day.

Where your gift goes

• £10 gives a child two weeks of hot school meals

• £25 plants and protects five native trees, cared for long after they are in the ground

• £50 backs a family for a month through a community savings group

• £100 trains a teacher to reach a whole classroom for a year

• £250 helps a Malagasy-run centre keep growing where grants cannot reach

On 11 July, Barbara is expected to be in the chapel in Clydach. So is Theresa Haine, who first went to Madagascar as a young volunteer teacher in the 1960s and became an MfM trustee 37 years ago. She has gone back every few years since. Recently, quietly, she said her last visit was probably just that, her last. Forty years of this friendship lives in people like Barbara and Theresa, and in every Malagasy teacher, forester and parent who has carried it forward.

The vision they all share is a simple one: every community in Madagascar living with dignity, free from poverty, in harmony with the environment. Come to the concert, or give from afar, and be part of the next chapter.