The Environmental Health Project (EHP) was inspired from the 1992 Rio Declaration’s goal to implement “integrated environment and development programmes at the local level, taking into account demographic trends and factors.” Building from this statement, the EHP strives to demonstrate the effectiveness of linking community-based natural resource management with interventions to improve health and encourage scale up among non-governmental and government organizations. Because of the Madagascar mission of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID/Madagascar), which called for the integration of population, health, and natural resource management activities, Madagascar became a natural choice for EHP activities.

The Midterm Progress Report looks at the EHP progress in Madagascar from1999-2001. The project was divided into four activities: management and coordination, model approaches, monitoring and evaluation, and dissemination of information. The Midterm Report acknowledges three key achievements of the EHP, being the baseline survey conducted in March/April 2001 by the National Institute of Statistics (under a subcontract to EHP), the overwhelming success of Voahray Salama as a functioning Malagasy group, and the developed key social marketing and capacity-building approaches for integrating activities at the community level. The report does not miss the issues either, such as funding, technical directions, and the institutionalization of Voahray Salama.