Food Security for Antalaha Prison Madagascar

Hello. My name is Tamar. I worked for 6 weeks in Antalaha Prison February 2023, mostly in the Children's Section, where women, babies and teenagers live in deplorable conditions. I spearheaded badly needed renovations but it was a drop in the bucket. The women and children are given some extra food from aid organizations but the men are fed a mere 500 calories a day of some kind of starch. Eighty percent of them do not have families to supplement their food. Starvation, malnutrition, and diseases are rampant. Men resort to eating banana peels from the sewer and many die of starvation.

The prison has verdant farmland which can be developed for food security, the idea being that the prisoners on good behavior can work the land. This model is already being used in another nearby prison where the prisoners happily work off their sentence and don't try and escape, knowing full well that they'll end up in the hellish prison in Antalaha if they get caught. We need funding to build infrastructure for about 50 inmates on the land, a guards house, a tractor, seeds, tools and a 2 motorcycles to transport the produce to the prison.

We already have a construction team ready to go and permission from the prison officials to develop this farm. All we need are funds. Money will be channeled to a registered and professional Madagascar-based organization which is invested in this project and accountability will be transparent, open to all who ask. This project will enable better nutrition on a sustainable basis into years to come.