“Empowerment—Fulfilled, Free, and Strong”: Conceptualizing Youth Empowerment in Madagascar Using an Arts-Based Methodology

The importance of fostering empowerment is widely acknowledged in global health, education, and development fields. However, empowerment is subject to contextual and cultural variations and defining and measuring it proves challenging. In Madagascar, no known efforts have sought to conceptualize youth empowerment. However, a contextually specific understanding of empowerment is needed to optimize programming, build political will, and ensure sustainability of development efforts. Leveraging arts-based methods, this project aims to elucidate how youth empowerment is conceptualized in Madagascar. We applied Visual Voices, a methodology characterized by emancipatory and decolonial core values of inclusivity and centering nontraditional ways of knowledge generation and sharing. Through a participatory and systematic approach, we conducted a creative workshop in Antsirabe, Madagascar with 18 experienced youth educators. Beginning with an ice breaker, the workshop progressed through painting, drawing, and writing activities, ending in a final exercise in which participants harmonized their creative outputs into one cohesive art piece to visualize and communicate key components of youth empowerment. The findings uncovered seven fundamental facets of empowerment for Malagasy youth, encompassing freedom, strength, goals, steps to reach goals, education, development, and community support. Additional thematic analysis revealed added considerations for conceptualizing youth empowerment based on participant discussions, specifically gender, outlook, and successes. In conclusion, utilizing Visual Voices successfully facilitated a process that uncovered the multidimensional complexities of youth empowerment in the Madagascar context. These findings are expected to guide future interventions and evaluation efforts to ensure they are attuned to the contextual nuances of youth empowerment in the country. It also aims to support future research to establish a robust definition of youth empowerment in the Madagascar context.