Dear Madagascar,

The world flavours its food with your work. Between 2018 and 2023 you grew 42 percent of the world’s vanilla, more than any other nation, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. You hold 11,072 cubic metres of renewable fresh water for each of you, and a living world found nowhere else. Seven in ten hectares of your land are farmed.

The World Bank is financing digital and energy connectivity, roads, a national water project, safety nets, rural livelihoods, basic health services and least-cost electricity access. Together they reach most of the guarantees where you fall short. They will matter most if each is measured at the household: a meal, a tap, a light and a visit to a clinic.

The work ahead is plain, and it is worth saying plainly. Only two in every hundred of you cook with clean fuel. At the last count, in 2019, ninety-five in every hundred of your children reached the end of primary school unable to read a simple text. Only thirteen in every hundred of you have a safely managed toilet at home. Clean energy sets your Coverage today, at 2 out of 100, with reading and shelter close behind. Each of them is within your reach.

A vanilla vine takes years to flower and is pollinated by hand, one bloom at a time. A decent life for every citizen is built the same way.

Now imagine that same resolve turned toward every home in the country. Picture Perfect Madagascar: a morning when every family cooks with clean fuel and sits down to a full table; when every tap runs clean and every home has a safe toilet; when every child walks to a school where a teacher is waiting, and reads with ease by the age of ten; when every mother lives within reach of a clinic with the lights on, and every young person finds work that pays. And no Malagasy falls below a decent life, because the nation has decided that none will.

“The world already pays a premium for what your island grows. Let that premium reach the people who grow it.”

So this is an invitation. Bring your vision, your story and your solutions to the Perfect Madagascar Design Studio, and join the Co-designers who are already imagining what comes next. Perfect Madagascar will not be designed for you. It will be designed by you.