We are beyond thrilled and proud to share that Projet Jeune Leader’s Founder and Executive Director, Maia Ramarosandratana, is one of 10 social impact leaders from around the world selected for Mulago’s 2024 Rainer Arnhold Fellowship!
One of the Mulago Foundation’s flagship programs, the Rainer Arnhold Fellowship finds leaders with promising poverty solutions and helps them to design and deliver them at scale. Over the course of the one-year fellowship, fellows receive strategic guidance, community and connections, funding, and other support from Mulago’s team and their extensive networks.
Mulago is proudly “impact and scale-obsessed.” Well, they might have met their match in Maia and Projet Jeune Leader! We can’t wait to nerd out about scaling strategies, learn from brilliant leaders, and continue striving for rigorous, measurable impact as Maia brings back new ideas and learnings to strengthen our work.
In honor of this recognition, we sat down with Maia to look back and look ahead at Projet Jeune Leader’s journey.
Let’s go back to the early days. What was the founding inspiration for Projet Jeune Leader?
I think we can all agree that puberty is a tough time for all young teenagers. Kids rarely get the information and support they need, but it’s a phase that shapes our lifelong beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.
Before Projet Jeune Leader, sexuality education was nonexistent in the public school system in Madagascar. Yet, sex education equips young adolescents with essential knowledge, skills, and support to thrive through adolescence and beyond. That’s what led me to found Projet Jeune Leader in 2013 in my hometown of Fianarantsoa, Madagascar.
We started implementing our comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) program in just four public middle schools in Fianarantsoa. Today, we work in over 100 public middle schools across three regions and anticipate more than tripling our reach in the next two years.
Something that’s unique about Projet Jeune Leader is that the organization is focused on just one thing – one CSE program. Can you explain why?
Pretty early on in our journey, we decided we wanted to go deep, not broad. We stopped doing one-off initiatives and instead invested in slow growth and rigorous evaluations of our core CSE program with the mission of reaching more and more young adolescents. We focused on where the need was greatest — rural communities — and then continuously refined and reworked our program to reach those communities. This meant making tough decisions about how to make our program more lean and cost-effective (with the same quality and rigor), including cutting out “nice to have” components of our program that weren’t linked to measurable improvements in outcomes and were impeding our ability to deliver our program in more challenging settings.
Our earlier years were focused on the “what”: what makes a highly effective CSE program for young Malagasy adolescents? With confidence and evidence about the “what,” we were able to turn to the “how.” That’s been our focus over the past few years: how can we deliver and sustain our CSE program at scale to achieve our vision of reaching every single young adolescent in Madagascar with high-quality CSE?
What’s on the horizon for Projet Jeune Leader now?
One, we are focusing on supporting government institutionalization of our program model in Madagascar’s public school system. We believe that this kind of “scaling through government” (in our case, in partnership with the national Ministry of Education and its teachers-in-training) is a promising avenue to leverage and strengthen existing education structures while reaching tens of thousands of rural students. We have successfully implemented two years of this government partnership model and we’re now actively working towards our goal of reaching 20% of rural middle school students in Madagascar by 2026.
But we recognize that to reach EVERY adolescent in Madagascar, we need to be able to reach those left out of the formal education system, too.
Our second priority is therefore to test a second scaling pathway — social franchising — with non-governmental actors that allows them to replicate our program-model with their young adolescent constituents. We will focus on bringing comprehensive sexuality education to particularly vulnerable groups, including those out-of-school and adolescents living with disabilities.
In short: it’s an incredibly exciting time for Projet Jeune Leader. We have a phenomenal team, including many colleagues who were our former CSE Educators, leading the charge to transform the lives of a new generation of Malagasy youth.
To wrap up… What does selection as a Mulago Rainer Arnhold Fellow mean to you?
I am still pinching myself! The organizations in Mulago’s portfolio and past Rainer Arnhold Fellows are names that I’ve looked up to. These social impact leaders have been on our “inspiration board” for years. It’s such an honor to see Projet Jeune Leader’s name alongside them.
As I mentioned earlier, there was a distinct point a few years ago when we realized we wanted to shift our organizational mindset to focus on scale – from “what” to “how.” I’m getting into nerdy distinctions here, but it was an intentional shift from focusing on replication and growth to scalability. Mulago’s writings and resources on scaling were hugely influential for us. They gave us the language to explain our values and goals and offered a certain validation that we were on the right track.
The learning and support I’ll gain through the fellowship couldn’t come at a better time. I’m so thankful for the opportunity and I can’t wait for the new insights and relationships it will unlock!
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