Madagascar

Madagascar, officially the Republic of Madagascar, is an island country in the Indian Ocean off the southeastern coast of Africa comprising the island of Madagascar and numerous smaller islands, the world's fourth-largest island and second-largest island country, with Antananarivo as its capital and largest city. Having split from Africa around 180 million years ago and from the Indian subcontinent roughly 90 million years ago, Madagascar's long isolation made it a biodiversity hotspot and one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries, with more than 90 percent of its wildlife found nowhere else. First permanently settled by Austronesian peoples arriving by outrigger canoe roughly 500 to 700 CE and joined around the ninth century by Bantu groups from East Africa, the island was later united and ruled from the early nineteenth century as the Kingdom of Madagascar by a series of Merina nobles until France annexed it in 1897; Madagascar gained independence in 1960 and has since passed through four constitutional republics, most recently restoring constitutional governance in January 2014 after a 2009 coup. A series of mass protests in 2025 resulted in a further military coup and the installation of Michael Randrianirina as president of a military junta. Classified by the United Nations as a least-developed country, Madagascar relies on ecotourism and agriculture for growth, though income disparities have widened and, as of 2021, 68.4 percent of the population was considered multidimensionally poor.