WCI Intern Projects

Projet Jeune Leader is an organization in Madagascar with a mission to provide high-quality comprehensive sexuality education to young adolescents across rural Madagascar — at scale, for the first time.

The organization's specialized Educators harness the power of comprehensive sexuality education to improve adolescents’ health, education, safety, and well-being. As part of their school-based program, Projet Jeune Leader produces and distributes educational magazines to young adolescents. These magazines reinforce key topics taught by their Educators in the formal classroom setting, in a fun and visual way.

WCI Intern: Maya Harish

Menstruation Education in Madagascar

Women and girls globally struggle with inadequate access to menstrual hygiene management. It is not only a health concern, but also an obstacle to girls' education and a barrier to gender equality. Lack of access to menstruation/reproductive health education, menstrual products, and menstrual hygiene facilities disrupts education for menstruating students. This issue starts as early as elementary school when girls in low-income countries such as Madagascar resort to absenteeism to avoid menstruation embarrassment. These students miss out on education, which causes them to fall behind, and later possibly dropout.  This increased dropout rate for young girls causes difficulty when entering the job market and further perpetuates the low status of women in society. More information on the issue can be found in this literature review written by Maya Harish.

to support maya’s project

Maya & WCI aim to help young girls in Madagascar deal with these concerns by expanding youth-focused and youth-developed education on menstrual health. To do so, we have partnered with Projet Jeune Leader, a Malagasy non-profit organization that designs curricula - as part of their comprehensive sexuality education program - designs educational materials and periodicals focused on teaching girls how to understand the changes in their bodies, take care of their sanitary needs, and safeguard their future physical and mental health.

Project Update!

We are pleased to share that Projet Jeune Leader have developed (in partnership with Malagasy women-owned publishing house Karné), printed, and distributed in our partner middle schools two new magazines issues on themes previously unexplored: managing money, and puberty - the latter with a strong Menstrual Health focus.

English translations of these new magazines here with additional copies of two magazines developed last year, one on boundary setting, the other on bullying. These have also been distributed in schools at the start of the school year (early September). 

These issues are available to students within their school, to read and discuss during recess and afterschool, often facilitated by a Projet Jeune Leader Educators. Kids can also borrow them to read with their family members at home.

*Funds donated through this portal are earmarked to fund menstrual health education in Madagascar. To send a check, please write "Maya Harish" in the memo line and mail to: Attn: Maya Harish @ WCI, P.O. Box 7281, Boulder, CO 80306