While the world was captivated with one blogger from Madagascar, Diana making the front page with her extraordinary social initiative for baby Kamba, the works of her fellow bloggers of the Rising Voices grantee FOKO may have been unnoticed.

With the commendable contributions from workshops coordinators cum bloggers like Stéphane, Lindsay, Hery, and Tantely FOKO could recruit and train a network of impressive new participants through a number of blogging workshops across Madagascar.

Stéphane, Andry and Hery are very busy on Skype with Joan

Stéphane Ramananarivo is one of the talented citizen journalists from Madagascar. He is tirelessly supporting FOKO by travelling, networking and training.

Click here for a video message of Stéphane Ramananarivo to the world.

Joan Razafimaharo informs about the outreach efforts of FOKO:

We had workshops through April to July in Tamatave, the economical capital of Madagascar which is 360km from Antananarivo, 6 hours road trip.

500 km and 10 hours by car from Antananarivo, the future of Malagasy Journalism is in the hands of the very energetic Lomelle, Zouboon, Rondro and their director Mr Vita. Unfortunately they are located in the outskirts of the city but this doesn’t keep most of the students in making great efforts to actively report on the latest news from the very lively Majunga.

Monsieur Vita the Director of the School of Journalism

The School of Journalism in Majunga has invited FOKO to help integrate Citizen Media to their curriculum. That will bring more exposure to FOKO.

The 8th FOKO Blog Club workshop was held on 24th May, 2008 in the capital Antananarivo and a party was organized for the blogging contest winners.

Hkambora writes about the Antekaran Kingdom in the northern region of Madagascar. Although the location is different most of the tribes share the same beliefs and practice the same traditions.

Rondro informs us about the Malagasy tradition called ‘Tromba’. They believe someone may be wealthy and happy because of the Tromba, the spirit of the royals (who lived happily) in possession of the body.

Read more interesting blog posts by participants on Malagasy culture and traditions, family and relationships.

The 9th Blogging workshop was held on June 21, 2008. Dadarabe and Lapino thanked the participants who contributed to the “Aza ampijaliana ny tenin-tsika” (Don’t ill-treat our language”) initiative. From the project blog:

The initiative was born when many bloggers lamented the poor Malagasy seen on the Internet, sparsed with liberties taken with the grammar etc. The event was mostly fun, with games played online by the participants, but these were “serious” games about Malagasy proverbs, grammar, knowledge of Malagasy language in general.

Patrick is the head of the English Club association in Tamatave who opened his blog during FBC 6 workshop. He brought his friends from BUEC (Barikadimy’s United English Club) for the 3 day long workshop in Toamasina.

He is a brilliant blogger himself and you can check his great posts including the one discussing need for conservation of the endangered lemur species.

In this video he discusses about blogging and the English club:

Are you interested to learn how one has fun in Madagascar? Read highlights of the posts of Foko Un-blog club.

You can find here more about the workshop and the list of new bloggers. Here is an updated list of FOKO bloggers.

Meanwhile the Malagasy blogosphere dedicated their 24th blogathon by blogging about baby Kamba.

The work of the FOKO team is praiseworthy especially they always keep their participants well informed about the other Rising Voices projects. Here is a post of Joan introducing to the latest six Rising Voices projects to the Malagasy Blogospehere. Here is an archive of more such posts.

All together this is a dream progress of a blog outreach project which started only 10 months ago and congratulations to FOKO for their efforts.