From a Vision to a Tool for Measuring Adolescent Empowerment: Concept Mapping

"So every adolescent thrives" has been our vision since day one. We've been working to make sure hundreds of thousands of adolescents across Madagascar — especially in rural areas — have the knowledge, skills, and support they need to thrive during adolescence and take on the everyday challenges they face.

But what does it actually mean for an adolescent to be "thriving"? How do we define adolescent empowerment?

It's a big, complex question to answer. So in 2024, we partnered up with research collaborators from the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health. We brought together 18 of our CSE educators, along with adolescent students, to take part in a participatory research effort using the Visual Voices methodology.

By the end of the process, participants had identified seven key aspects essential to youth empowerment in Madagascar: having freedom, strength, goals, steps to achieve those goals, education, development, and community support. During a second phase of analysis, the team also identified cross-cutting themes, including gender, future outlook, and success.

Since October 2025, we've moved into a deeper next phase of research with a participatory study called "Creating a Measurement Tool for Malagasy Adolescent Empowerment." This time, the goal is beyond just answering the question: we're trying to build a quantitative tool that can actually measure the empowerment of Malagasy adolescents.

Inclusive, Participatory Research through Concept Mapping

Empowerment looks different depending on the context and culture. Adolescent empowerment, in particular, is heavily shaped by cultural, family, and community factors.

Concept Mapping is a mixed-methods, participatory research approach that builds a conceptual framework showing how a group understands a topic. One of the biggest strengths of this methodology in community research is that participants actively generate the data and analysis themselves, so the end result reflects their own perspectives rather than the researchers'.

We brought together a wide range of participants: young adolescent girls and boys, mothers and fathers, teachers, community leaders, and national experts. All played a key role to co-create the dimensions and indicators of “empowerment.”

Fandresena, research lead from the PJL team, during a research activity with a community participant.

We intentionally conducted the process in two very different regions. The first was Haute Matsiatra, representing a more urbanized, more educated Highlands context, where participants included teachers, young adolescents in their final year of middle school (9th grade, or troisième), and parents of students at Mahazengy public middle school.

The second was Atsimo-Andrefana, a coastal, rural region where community norms and gender dynamics look very different. We organized workshops in the villages of Andavadoaka and Ankindranoky, with participants including young girls and boys, mothers and fathers, and youth leaders (heads of local youth groups from the NGO Blue Ventures).

This diversity is what makes the research so rich: it captures a range of viewpoints. It also helps us ensure that the tool we build in the final phase of the process reflects a diversity of perspective on how adolescent empowerment is understood.

Fandresena, our Research and Special Projects Coordinator who led this research, reflected:

"This research is something I'm really proud of. The skills, ideas, and voices of adolescents and parents, which so often go unrecognized, were valued throughout this research and will become the foundation of the tool we design. And participants themselves saw this research as something actually important."

After the research wrapped up in these two regions, we held a workshop with several national experts in Antananarivo. This participatory session focused on brainstorming ideas and perspectives across a range of fields of expertise.

This generated 1,336 ideas from participants, all centered on completing the statement: "An adolescent is thriving and happy when they are…"

Analysis and Next Steps

The second phase of the research got underway this past February with an analysis workshop. Our partner researchers grouped the 1,336 ideas collected in phase one into categories based on similar themes. By the end of this process, we had 58 organized ideas. Participants from each of our original groups then rated each idea for clarity and importance using a simple, predefined scale.

This month, we're in the middle of the third and final phase: the interpretation session. We're sharing the results of the analysis of all the ideas that were generated and rated with all participants from both regions and the national experts in Antananarivo. This step will allow us to finalize the key dimensions of empowerment for Malagasy adolescents, and to finish developing the measurement tool itself.

“Mpanabe,” or CSE educators, played a key role as researchers and participants in the process.

An Essential, Innovative Tool for Measuring a Complex Concept

Once this final phase wraps up, we'll have a quantitative tool for measuring the empowerment of Malagasy adolescents — not built around universal, one-size-fits-all indicators, but around the specific populations and contexts it's meant to serve.

"With this tool, we'll be able to better measure and track whether our program is truly making a difference in the lives and empowerment of young adolescents," Fandresena explains. She continues:

"We'll be able to pinpoint exactly which parts of our program are driving that impact, and where we still have room to improve to better reach our goal. On top of that, this tool could be used by any organization working with youth in Madagascar. Because once we can better measure youth empowerment — and see where young people still need support — it will have a real, lasting impact on the development of Malagasy adolescents."