Paper short abstract:

Academic research about the Malagasy diaspora is very scarce. This paper aims at providing quantitative evidence about the characteristics of the collective organisation of the Malagasy diaspora and qualitative evidence of their links with their country of origin.

Paper long abstract:

The Malagasy diaspora is estimated to be the largest sub-Saharan African diaspora in France. But the quantity of research about it is inversely proportional to its size. This paper aims at bridging the gap and bring some quantitative and qualitative evidence about the collective organization of the Malagasy diaspora and its links with Madagascar. This paper is divided into two parts:

Firstly, I bring quantitative evidence about the characterisation of the association of the Malagasy diaspora. Thanks to a dataset provided by "data.gouv" -an official public open data website- I put forward some insights about the association linked to Madagascar. These results are compared with those of other important sub-Saharan African diasporas . The principal results show a relatively weak number of associations linked to Madagascar by Malagasy migrants, an atypical temporal trajectory of the creation of associations which seems correlated with the political cycle in the origin country, and a Malagasy diaspora in which the cultural and religious associations are relatively more important than in other diasporas.

In the second part, I present some results about a pilot survey conducted on leaders of Malagasy associations in Paris. About twenty leaders have been interviewed in order to understand their personal link with Madagascar, the way their association acts in the diaspora and what are they doing for their home country. The main results show that Malagasy associations are more involved in actions aiming at organizing the community than creating strong links with their origin country.