Madagascar

Richard Cowper

Richard Cowper

Richard Cowper is going to Madagascar for six months in November 2008 to work as a volunteer under the aegis of the Dodwell trust, a charity run by the famous British explorer, Christina Dodwell.

Madagascar is one of the world’s most beautiful islands, with a vast array of unique animal and plant species. But it is also one of the world’s poorest nations with significant health and social problems. Some 20,000 children die of malaria, in this the world’s fourth largest island, every year.

In addition to his work for the Dodwell Trust his appointment as adviser to the International Board of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine came as a great fillip for until that moment his belief that he really might be able to make a difference might easily have been dismissed as hubris.

 But now at least there was at least one brilliant, world-class organisation with a century of achievement in tropical health behind it, that believed he just might be able to be of some use in this, one of the world’s poorest countries where a host of tropical diseases, notably malaria, but including dengue fever and even plague, still run rampant.