Before Projet Jeune Leader, there was no sex ed in Madagascar’s public schools. Kids had questions but nowhere to turn: not teachers, rarely parents, not the internet given low access. Furthermore, rural Madagascar sees high rates of early pregnancy and school dropout. Our comprehensive sexuality education program, integrated in middle schools, intervenes early while strengthening the public education system.
We train, equip, and support middle school teachers in rural Madagascar to deliver our sex ed program. Rural schools are small (200 to 250 students on average) so one educator can reach the entire student body. These specialized teachers teach sex ed as a stand-alone subject to every grade. Classes are integrated into students’ schedules, 1 hour per week, like any other subject. Our curriculum covers 108 modules over 4 years of middle school, with modules such as puberty, gender equality, healthy relationships, and other health and leadership topics. Educators use our scripted, participatory lesson plans; this makes the classes easy to teach and increases adherence to the curriculum. We’ve reached 250,000+ adolescents to date and have strong evidence that our model works. Not only do we see students’ gains in health knowledge, self-efficacy, and positive gender attitudes, but we also see spillover effects on school culture, parent-child communication, educational achievement, and more.
In 2013—our founding year—Projet Jeune Leader served 2,500 students in 4 schools. Today, we reach 56,000 students in 153 schools. We built a lean, low-cost, evidence-based model adapted to our low-resource context, cutting non-essential elements and focusing on maintaining quality at scale. With our model tested, over the past two years we’ve focused on scaling nationally in partnership with the Ministry of Education. In 2022, we created a training track on our sex ed program for teachers within the public teacher training institutes. Beginning May 2025, the Ministry of Education is funding expansion of our model to 400,000 students in 1,700 schools in the next two years. It's a huge leap to scale for us!
Over the past decade, we’ve shifted our mindset from implementing an intervention to designing a scalable program model. That meant maintaining the rigor and effectiveness of our program (as measured through regular qualitative and quantitative evaluations), while making it simple enough and low-cost enough for low-resource, rural settings. For instance, we cut out some non-essential elements of our pilot intervention (e.g., building a Youth Space on school grounds), maintaining only those components that were most impactful for adolescents’ positive development. And we designed low-cost strategies to support implementation fidelity (e.g., scripted curricula) and monitor adherence (e.g., regular phone calls to school directors).
Currently, we are focused on scaling up our program in Madagascar’s public education system. However, we are also in the early stages of testing a social franchising partnership model that would allow non-governmental organizations and private schools in Madagascar to replicate our program-model with the adolescents they serve. Interested partners can contact us through our website.
