When we landed in Mahajanga, in the northwest of Madagascar, the skies had cleared. The storm had passed. The damage had not.
Cyclone Fytia formed over the Mozambique Channel in late January and intensified as it moved east. When it hit Madagascar, at least 12 people lost their lives. Roads were washed away. Bridges were waterlogged. Trees were ripped from the ground. What little infrastructure existed in some communities simply gave in.
But what stayed with me was not only the destruction. It was the exhaustion.
The Malagasy people I met were calm, almost quiet in their suffering. There was no dramatic display of anger. No real chaos. Cyclone Fytia felt less like a shocking event and more like something familiar. Almost like another blow in a country that seems to absorb more than its share.
Before I arrived, I had read the World Bank’s country report on Madagascar. Nearly 80 percent of the population lives in poverty. Child malnutrition is widespread. The country struggles with low tax revenues, weak investment and repeated climate shocks.
Reading that report in Johannesburg felt clinical. Seeing it in Mahajanga felt different. The statistics were no longer numbers. They were faces.
In Antananarivo, the capital, there are signs of economic activity. Markets move. Cars fill the roads. There is noise and some sense of momentum. In Mahajanga, the energy feels thinner. The cyclone deepened what was already fragile.
I travelled with the Salaam Foundation, which distributes aid in places the world rarely focuses on.
I had been with them before in a remote village in the mountainous south of Yemen, where running water was scarce and daily survival required extraordinary resilience. At the time, I thought that was the worst poverty I had witnessed.
Madagascar challenged that belief.
Here, poverty is not concentrated in one forgotten pocket. It stretches across communities. It lingers. You see it in the long queues of women waiting patiently for a bag of rice. You see it in the numbers. Thousands arrived for food parcels intended for a few hundred families. The need was overwhelming.
We visited hospitals and distributed rice to families of patients with Mpox. We met mothers who had just given birth and were already worrying about their next meal. The rice, they told us, would help them rebuild after the cyclone. It would buy time. Nothing more.
Over the years, I have reported on poverty and climate crises.
I have interviewed policymakers and written about structural inequality. But walking through Madagascar, I kept asking myself whether we truly understand how vulnerability compounds vulnerability. How one shock lands on top of another, leaving very little space to recover.
A week before, I had been in Doha, Qatar, one of the richest countries in the world. I was attending a series of summits where global leaders and thinkers debated the future. The language was full of artificial intelligence, automation and innovation. There was excitement about what technology would solve next.
In Doha, poverty is not visible. Public spaces are orderly. Systems function seamlessly. The vulnerable are not on the streets. Everything appears managed.
In Madagascar, there is no buzz about AI. There is urgency about clean water. There is no talk about robots transforming daily life. There is a rush for rice.
The contrast unsettled me.
This is what climate inequality looks like in practice. Countries that contribute least to global emissions face the harshest consequences. Storms grow stronger. Infrastructure fails. Recovery is never complete before the next disaster strikes.
I left Madagascar angry and frustrated. Angry at how normal this has become. Frustrated at how easily global attention moves on. I felt an even deeper responsibility to keep telling stories about people who are too often overlooked.
Then, as I landed back in Johannesburg, news broke that another cyclone was heading towards the island.
Cyclone Gezani has since torn through parts of Madagascar. More than 20 people have so far been confirmed dead. The national meteorological service warned of widespread flooding, flash floods and landslides as it moved across the central highlands. Red alerts were issued in several regions. Residents described electricity outages and severe damage to homes. One person told AFP that everything was devastated, that roofs had blown off and walls had collapsed.
It is hard not to feel disheartened. But despair does not change anything.
If anything, these repeated storms remind us that care cannot be occasional and that attention cannot come only when disaster images trend online.
If we are serious about building a better future, whether through technology or policy, that future must include places like Mahajanga. Otherwise, we are not imagining progress for everyone. We are simply deciding who gets left behind.
Qaanitah’s trip to Madagascar was part of a humanitarian effort led by Salaam Foundation. To support our journalism and to help us tell untold stories email debrief@thedebriefnetwork.com.
