Meet some children from Madagascar in this heart warming short video. Madagascar is one of the poorest countries on the planet and conditions there for children are harsh. Half of all children under the age of five will die of diarrhoea, those who do survive will suffer from frequent bouts of illness even at school, where only 18% of Madagascar's schools have access to drinking water and only 30% have toilets.

Most children who live in Madagascar help their families raise rice and herd cattle, mainly ox-like mammals, and they measure their wealth by how many cattle they have. Children and their families live in homes mainly made of traditional logs with grass providing the roof and without basic amenities such as electricity which is almost unheard of outside urban areas.

Toys for children in Madagascar are far removed from those available to children in more developed countries as they are made from discarded plastic bags, oil-drum lids and pebbles. You would think that in a country where 85% of children in rural areas live below the poverty line and 40% are malnourished things couldn't get much worse. But they are following the recent military coup and suspension of humanitarian aid from the EU.

Struggling to survive, parents are taking children in their millions out of school to supplement already meagre incomes with these children now working as labourers in the fishing industry, as domestic servants or in stone quarries. And we're not talking just teenagers here. One seven year old boy stated "I have to crush two big bags of gravel per day to make my mother happy." Mother is happy to survive another day with her family. Makes you think about sponsoring one of these children doesn't it?