Toliara in the context of "Vezo"

Districts are second-level administrative divisions of Madagascar below the regions. There are 114 districts in Madagascar. Districts are themselves divided into communes; while some of the districts in urban areas (such as the City districts of Antananarivo, Antsirabe I, Antsiranana I, Fianarantsoa I, Toamasina I and Toliara I) and offshore islands (such as the districts of Nosy Be and Nosy Boraha) each consist of only one commune, most of the districts are divided typically into 5–20 communes.

The Sakalava are an ethnic group primarily found on the western edge of Madagascar, ranging from Toliara in the south to the Sambirano River in the north. They constitute about 6.2 percent of the total population of Madagascar, or about 2,079,000 in 2018.

The origin of the word Sakalava is not fully known. The most common explanation is that their name means "people of the long valleys", or a similar modern Malagasy translation of long ravines, which denotes the relatively flat nature of the land in western Madagascar. Another theory is that the word is possibly from the Arabic saqaliba (which is in turn derived from Late Latin sclavus), meaning slave.