Amandla Development is committed to supporting Philippi youth from cradle to career, aiming to improve the accessibility of youth friendly health services, decrease the stigma around testing and openly pursuing one’s sexual health journey, and create more activities that draw youth to Amandla’s community spaces.

Philippi township, Cape Town, is an extremely difficult place to grow up for the 25,000 youth who live there. The youth-friendly health hubs at Amandla Development offer young people a place to come and play, get educational support, and access clinical health services designed for them.

Amandla’s Resource Access Program provides direct mentoring and an empowerment curriculum to build youth agency and awareness to access health, education, and social services. 

Mentors improve accessibility of youth-friendly health services, and decrease the stigma around HIV testing.

Amandla employs recent graduates as peer mentors, sending them into local schools to give one-on-one counseling to students and provide workshops in life skills.  Their one-year internship focuses on teaching life skills to a wide range of young people, while at the same time helping the mentors build their own work skills with ongoing educational opportunities and on-the-job training.  The mentors improve accessibility of youth-friendly health services, and decrease the stigma around HIV testing. 

An additional set of mentors have recently been deployed to focus on reducing LGBTQI+ stigma and make referrals to safe spaces and LGBTQI+-friendly health services. 

Amandla also created and currently lead the Philippi Collective Network, a network of over 50 community-based organizations that all sign on to community goals and objectives.