Hantanirina Rasasmimanana

Biography

Pr. Hantanirina Rasamimanana, Malagasy author and head of the Education Component of the Ako Project is a senior lecturer-researcher at the École Normale Supérieure of the University of Antananarivo. She teaches biology and pedagogy. Founder member of GERP, the Malagasy Primatological Society. Scientific coordinator of the IPS Congress in Madagascar 1998. She has an impressive record of field researches on ring-tailed lemurs (Lemur catta) and sifaka (Propithecus v.verreauxi). She has also had to combine conservation and teaching researches with the sharp end of global politics.
Many school-teachers, graduate students and high public officers in the Education Ministry of Madagascar are her ex-students, so she is placed at the intersection of research and education.
Nowadays she leads a team with two dozen of them to run a Non Governmental Organization on Environmental and Sustainable Development Education and to whom she tries to pass the torch. They deal most of the time with schools and universities to directly train teachers and students in the field. They set up one acre garden for re-wilding. They grow some Madagascar endemic trees and some endemic and non endemic birds are flying there. Reptiles are encountered there.
She was the 2022 Charles Southwick Conservation Education Commitment Winner.
She is the Madagascar candidate for the 2023 UNESCO Sultan Qabus Award.