The WaterBlog

Tracking down rodents in Madagascar’s bustling capital city

Authors: Luwieke Bosma, Lucia Moreno Spiegelberg and Gauthier Dobigny. Good day! My name is Rova and I live in Ankasina, a neighbourhood of Antananarivo, the capital city of our beautiful island Madagascar! I guess you would describe our neighbourhood as a slum, but we call it here “bas-quartier”, meaning the “lowland district. This name has a history: in the past, the kings and queens, their court and the rich and powerful people lived in the higher parts of the land. While poor workers were cultivating rice in these floodable, lower parts of the country to feed them. Today, most of poor areas of Antananarivo lie within these lowlands that still get flooded nowadays, as you can see in the pictures. Many of the “bas-quartiers” consist of informal and very vulnerable settlements, mostly inhabited by poor families which usually have very limited access to jobs, education or health. They are highly insalubrious. Figure 1 These photos show the poverty levels and… Continued