About us – D.E.M.T

ABOUT US

SAVING LIVES

About us

We are a rural youth-led organisation working in Southern Africa. We exist to improve the way public institutions understand and act on rural youth realities. Using existing constitutional spaces, we make rural youth visible in decisions that shape disasters, natural resources, and healthcare - sectors where institutional gaps translate quickly into real risks for rural families.

Our Vision

A Southern Africa where rural youth shape public decisions, and public services work as planned.

Our Mission

Because rural youth are locked out of policy spaces, we connect them with public institutions to influence decisions that affect their environment, livelihoods, and health

Core Values

Community Participation

Community Participation - Our interventions and strategic plans are driven by, decided by, and developed in close consultation with identified community needs and are informed by action plans proposed by affected communities and their established hierarchical leaders.

Strong Community Focus

Our interventions and actions are community focused, with the aim of providing fully inclusive interventions that benefit and are accessible to all, including the most vulnerable and marginalized groups of society.

Building Grassroots Networks

We are committed to establishing effective grassroots networks that are able to respond to their own challenges with minimal external support, thus reducing donor dependency.

Partnerships

We partner with sector related government ministries, other organizations, and the affected communities for a coordinated response, maximizing on resources and avoiding effort duplication.

Putting Women and Youth at the Centre

In all our interventions we will be determined to creating an accommodating environment that prioritise and enable youth and women to stand up for themselves.

Our Objectives

To break the digital, geographic, and literacy barriers that block rural youth from public information and decision making spaces.
To make rural youth participation a standard practice of public planning, budgeting, and service review.
To ensure disaster, natural resource, and health decisions are based on community evidence from rural youth

Where We Work

We are based in Zimbabwe and operate in Southern Africa, targeting remote and underserved rural communities. These areas typically have weak road networks, limited digital connectivity, low literacy levels, and poor access to information, despite having the largest youth populations.

Who We Serve and Why

Our core constituency is rural youth, who are often excluded from public planning and decision-making processes. Engaging young people in these spaces ensures that the evidence informing decisions reflects the realities on the ground, improving the effectiveness of disaster management, environmental protection, and healthcare delivery.

Our Entry Points

We leverage national constitutions and legal frameworks that guarantee public participation as entry points to engage rural youth in public systems. This ensures our interventions are grounded in both law and policy while fostering collaborative relationships with public institutions.

Our Simplified Theory of Change:

When rural youth gain regular access to planning, budgeting, and service delivery monitoring spaces, their evidence informs public decisions, leading to better disaster management, environmental protection, and healthcare delivery - areas where breakdowns are felt immediately in rural communities.

How We Achieve Our Vision

We position rural youth inside the processes that shape planning, spending, and frontline delivery, ensuring decisions are grounded in local evidence. Our work focuses on areas where young people rarely reach public systems: remote communities with weak connectivity, limited information access, and low visibility in institutional decision-making.

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