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The Axian Foundation has opened the 250th school it has built in Madagascar, at Ambahikily in the Morombe district of the Atsimo-Andrefana region, fifteen years after it started.
The primary school there was working out of buildings that included one put up in 1925 and close to collapse. It now has three new primary classrooms, three preschool rooms, toilets, a handwashing station and play areas, alongside three older buildings that have been repaired.
More than 1,000 children attend, taught by 27 teachers, and nearly 1,150 will study in the new buildings this year.
The foundation built it with United World Schools, a charity it has worked with across Atsimo-Andrefana for years. The two have put up around 30 schools in the region between them.
Two other things started at the same ceremony. United World Schools opened a training centre for teachers in the region, equipped with computers supplied by Yas Madagascar, and the foundation laid the first stone of a multi-sport pitch at the school under a programme called M'Hetsika MVola.
The region's chief, the prefect of Atsimo-Andrefana and officials from the regional education directorate attended, alongside the foundation's executive director and the global director of United World Schools.
Schooling in that part of Madagascar is difficult. Atsimo-Andrefana is among the poorest and driest regions of a country where most people live below the poverty line, and public infrastructure is thin.
The money behind the foundation comes from Axian Group, which Hassanein Hiridjee runs. The conglomerate operates across 32 countries and territories in telecoms, energy, financial services, real estate and innovation, and was Madagascar's largest company by turnover with revenue of $1.9 billion in 2022.
Its telecoms arm renamed itself Yas Group this month, adopting across the whole company the brand it gave its mobile networks in 2024. That business reported revenue of $980 million in the first half of this year, up 26%, with 45.5 million subscribers.
Hiridjee was born in Antananarivo in 1975 and took over the family firm in 1997, moving it into telecoms in 2004 when it bought the newly privatised state operator. He and his brother Amin consolidated everything under the Axian name in 2015.
The foundation has averaged about 17 schools a year since it began.
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