Our CSE Program Is Going National!

« Picture yourself at 12 years old… Do you remember the pimples, the awkward run-ins with your crush in the school hallway, the wild rush of hormones and above all, those endless questions!?

Early adolescence, the period from ages 10 to 14, is a whirlwind. Everything changes: your body, your emotions, your place in the world, your family dynamics… And for teens growing up in rural Madagascar, it’s even harder. They’re full of questions and worries, but often have no one they trust to turn to. There was a huge, unmet demand for quality, long-term, comprehensive sexuality and life skills education.

That’s exactly why Projet Jeune Leader was born in 2013, in Fianarantsoa—the city where I grew up. Back then, I had no team, no strategic plan, no procedure manuals, and no donors. But I had one powerful belief: that Malagasy youth deserve full, consistent support as they go through this defining life stage. 

We launched as a pilot program in four public middle schools, reaching 2,700 students. From day one, our goal was clear: integrate comprehensive sexuality education directly into the public school system—not as a one-off intervention, but as part of the school itself, using the existing structure.

And soon enough, the enthusiasm from students, teachers, principals, and parents told us we were onto something big. There was real potential in this idea.

The big question then became: How do we scale this? And how do we make it sustainable? »

- Maia, Projet Jeune Leader’s Executive Director and Founder

Twelve years later. Starting in September 2025, our comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) program will expand to 1,747 public middle schools across 16 regions — reaching nearly 400,000 students, or about 1 in 6 rural Malagasy adolescents.

Here’s the biggest part: This rollout is being led by the Ministry of Education. As of this month, the partnership is officially signed and sealed. The government will fund the direct delivery costs of this scale-up and has contracted Projet Jeune Leader to provide delivery support.

Maia, during the celebration of this great news with our friends and partners.

The spark to scale

Over the past decade, we built and refined a model rooted in the rural Malagasy context, earned deep community support, and steadily engaged government stakeholders. Our advocacy wasn't in the form of reports or conferences. We brought education officials to see our work firsthand, shared community stories of change, and let decision-makers hear directly from principals and teachers. The result: we cultivated a sense of ownership by champions within the Ministry of Education, and they pushed this forward from within.

In 2022, we began a pilot with the Ministry of Education: training government teacher-trainees, rather than CSE Educators we recruited and trained from the general population, to deliver our program in public schools. It worked. Over three years, we proved the model across the Haute Matsiatra region.

This is the model now being scaled. PJL will train teacher-trainees and recent graduates to deliver CSE (alongside their core subject), and we’ll provide ongoing support, supervision, and quality assurance. The government is covering all delivery costs and contracting PJL for this delivery support.

What’s next?

The work is just beginning! This scale-up will multiply our student reach seven-fold. We now need to intensely focus on: monitoring and maintaining quality, advancing concrete policy changes that will further the institutionalization of CSE in the school system, and leading implementation research to fully understand how this CSE program-model works, at near national scale.

We'll be sharing this journey of scaling our impact in a blog series “Behind the Scenes : Mainstreaming CSE in Madagascar”. So, stay tuned!