Projet Jeune Leader

Empowering youth to take charge of their sexual-reproductive health and live healthy, productive lives.

The Problem

Young adolescents in Madagascar are confronted with staggering challenges such as gender-based violence, childhood marriage, early pregnancy, and school abandonment. The data on the situation speaks for itself: One in three Malagasy girls will fall pregnant before the age of 18. Over 40% of girls are married as a child. And only 18% of students who enter middle school finish.

The Solution

Projet Jeune Leader is a youth-founded, youth-led, and youth-centered organization that takes an innovative and holistic approach to comprehensive sexuality education, directly responding to these issues in Madagascar.

We place dynamic and highly-trained Youth Educators between the ages of 18 and 25 full-time in public middle schools to teach comprehensive (and fun!) sexuality and leadership classes, provide counselling and medical referrals, run Youth-friendly spaces created by the Project, and conduct fun extracurricular activities for students throughout the school year.

We’ve shown that students in Projet Jeune Leader’s programming

  • Feel supported by and connected to their school environment, and find new joy in learning and dedication to continuing their education,
  • Understand their changing bodies during puberty, master essential sexual-reproductive information, and reflect on gender norms and inequities in their communities, and
  • Utilize their newly-learned leadership skills to advocate for themselves on their rights, ambitions, and issues related to their sexual and reproductive health!

Sexually active or not, young adolescents in Projet Jeune Leader receive the information, skills, support, and access to reproductive health services they need to lead healthy and productive lives.

Stage of Development

  • Early Stage
  • Established Prototype
  • Scaling
  • Other

Organization to Receive Funds

Projet Jeune Leader. Funds from this challenge will be used to support programming in a peri-urban school in Fianarantsoa, Madagascar, directly benefiting 700 young adolescent students.

Find Out More

This project was nominated by: