Grantee Profile

Youth Mentors and Developers (YMAD) is a youth-led and driven organisation situated and working in the Pietermaritzburg area in KwaZulu-Natal founded in 2016, whose primary focus is restoring the dignity of informal settlement dwellers in the Khan Road vicinity and neighbouring settlements. YMAD’s aim is to shift the narrative of informal settlements as places of environmental injustice and degradation and create an environmentally conscious informal settlement for the future. They do this by creating safer, greener, and cleaner informal settlements through participatory community-based activities focused on clean ups, awareness drives and infrastructural development. YMAD received a grant to build a recycling hub at the centre of the settlement and to train community-based waste champions.