Maia Ramarosandratana
Executive Director and Founder
Antsirabe
Maia is Projet Jeune Leader’s Executive Director. She founded Projet Jeune Leader in 2013. As Executive Director, she has transformed Projet Jeune Leader from its early roots into an innovative organization with almost two dozen core staff and 150+ Educators spanning three regions of Madagascar.
She has driven our efforts to grow at scale while upholding the quality and integrity of our programs by investing in rigorous M&E, building partnerships with government (including the national Ministry of Education), and increasing tenfold from 2013 both our operating budget (entirely grant-funded) and the number of students we serve. In addition to leading all operations and fundraising, she plays a leadership role on the technical side, working closely with our programs team to develop curricula, trainings, external resources, and new pedagogical tools.
Maia has lived in Madagascar for two decades and is fluent in English, French, and Malagasy. She received a B.A. from Haverford College and a Masters in Public Health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her efforts to transform comprehensive sexuality education in Madagascar have been recognized with a “120 under 40: The New Generation of Family Planning Leaders” award from the Bill & Melinda Gates Institute for Reproductive Health. She was selected as a Gratitude Network Fellow in 2020 and was a 2016 Laureate Global Fellow of Youth Action Net (International Youth Foundation). She is a graduate of the 2023 cohort of the Issroff Family Foundation Collaborative Learning Initiative.
I created Projet Jeune Leader to challenge the status quo of one-time and one-directional sexual health education. In the years since our founding, my phenomenal team has built a model of comprehensive sexuality education that has transformed schools and communities across Madagascar and reaches tens of thousands of young adolescents with critical knowledge and support.