Projet Jeune Leader, in collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh Public Health, applied a participatory art-based approach to better understand what youth empowerment means in Madagascar.
Since its inception, Projet Jeune Leader (PJL) has set an ambitious vision: for every Malagasy youth to thrive during adolescence. Our model is designed to help them tackle the daily challenges they face, especially in rural areas where the rates of early pregnancies and marriages are concerning. Limited access to health information, quality education, and youth-friendly services often exacerbates the situation.
What does “thriving” mean in Madagascar’s context? And most importantly, what does this concept mean to the young Malagasy that PJL aims to serve?
To begin to answer these questions, we once again collaborated with our partner researchers from the University of Pittsburgh Public Health, Drs. Jessica Burke and Sara Baumann.
Conceptualizing empowerment through art
Visual Voices began close to thirty years ago as an art project led by Dr. Michael Yonas and focused on providing a creative and fun space for youth to experiment with art materials, share their thoughts, learn from each other and develop relationships. In 2009, Dr. Jessica Burke partnered with Dr. Yonas to transform Visual Voices into a formal arts-based participatory research method. Visual Voices enables participants to examine a wide range of community‐generated health priority issues through drawing, painting, and writing.
We decided to use the Visual Voices methods to specifically explore what empowerment means to Malagasy youth.
Empowerment is an undeniably important facet of youth health and development (and for youth to “thrive”) ; however, there are many cultural and contextual variations in defining it. We wanted to better understand what ‘being empowered’ means in our context, given that we continually strive to design, implement, and evaluate our program so that it responds to our young constituents’ needs and priorities.
A creative and fun workshop with young adult PJL Educators
Coming from the University of Pittsburgh, Drs. Burke and Baumann traveled many miles and many hours to meet our team in Madagascar. Having gotten to know PJL through documents and videoconferences since 2020, they were excited to experience our work in-person for the first time!
As part of the researchers’ time in Madagascar, we brought together 18 of our young adult PJL Educators to participate in the Visual Voices research activity.
Using this powerful arts-based tool, participants created illustrations, paintings, and poems to meaningfully reflect upon the complex topic of youth empowerment. After creating their pieces, the PJL Educators then harmonized their individual work into one cohesive art piece under their own direction and vision.
Youth empowerment, according to PJL Educators
Through their writings, drawings, and paintings, Educators highlighted seven key themes of youth empowerment in Madagascar: having freedom, strength, goals, steps to achieve those goals, education, development, and community support.
For example, in her painting, PJL Educator Auréa depicted how the development process is life opportunities and exposures, combined with decision-making abilities:
“...Because [the animal] is in the fence, he’s not able to see what’s outside the fence, and so even though there’s a sun there, the animal is not able to see what’s outside the fence because it’s contained...[Below] we see that the animal’s chain is broken, it is able to go see what it wants, it is able to make its own decisions, make those decisions to really develop who they are as a person, or, animal. They see a lot of different things. And since they are able to see so many things, they are able to make a choice that’s best for them, fulfills them.”
PJL Educator Sylvie also her painting in detail, pointing to the importance of strength for ‘weathering the storm’ of navigating life’s ups and downs to emerge empowered:
“…there’s the ocean. So, this ocean is like life. You’re going through life, you have to go up against the waves.... even in life, you have to go through challenges...this is what I consider empowerment, because we’ve gone through all these different ‘waves of the ocean’ in your community, your life, the challenges [referring to the lightning]… And it ended with the boat. This is what I consider empowerment... When you’re empowered, you’re on the boat.”
PJL Educator Rivo also highlighted the gendered aspects of empowerment in his drawing:
“So it’s a woman driving a truck, and the man is bringing his children. So, when the woman was little, she already started to like trucks. So even though she was a woman, there wasn’t a barrier for her to achieve what she loves, to drive a truck. And that’s the same with the man. He likes kids, he likes children, and he’s not embarrassed to raise his children, to bring them in the public… what I want to show is there shouldn’t be a barrier to what you do. Your sex shouldn’t be a barrier to what you choose, but it should be based on who you are as a person."
Finally, PJL Educator Olivier’s poem touched upon several themes of empowerment uncovered during the workshop.
Ongoing collaboration towards a better future
Knowing that there is not yet a Malagasy word to translate and define youth empowerment in Madagascar, this project is the first to start building a contextually relevant definition.
Importantly, the Visual Voices method offered the core people of our program – our young adult Educators – a space where their voices can be heard, respected, and valued. After collaborating with our Educators, we then applied the Visual Voices with our most important constituents: middle school students (Blog article about this process coming soon!) We will continue to build upon youth’s expertise with future research to generate a contextually relevant definition of youth empowerment we can use to evaluate and improve our program.
Visual Voices has proven to be a valuable tool to get us to one step closer to our vision of a life where every Malagasy adolescent can fully thrive!
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