In rural Southern Zambia, a simple room beside a clinic becomes a place of welcome, conversation and hope. Here, young Zambians learn how to protect their health, stay in school and imagine futures that once felt out of reach. Tonga Teen Corners exists to create and activate these youth-friendly spaces, one community at a time.
What is Tonga Teen Corners?
Tonga Teen Corners is a French volunteer-run association that works with local Zambian partners to build youth-friendly spaces in rural medical centers and to support the young leaders who animate them. Our work sits at the meeting point of public health and education, giving adolescents confidential places to ask questions, find peer mentors and connect to care and schooling.
Three pillars that drive our work
Youth corners in
rural clinics
We help fund and equip dedicated rooms beside rural health facilities in Southern Province, designed to national standards for adolescent care and rooted in the lives of the communities they serve.
Peer mentoring
and outreach
Together with On Call Africa and district health authorities, we support the identification and training of teen ambassadors who welcome younger students, lead discussions on “living a positive life,” and carry theater, song and health messages into more remote villages.
Education as a
lever of health
When youth-friendly spaces work, young people stay in school longer and are better able to use government scholarship schemes. For a small number of exemplary student leaders, we now offer complementary educational support so that financial barriers do not erase years of effort.
Where we work
Our work is firmly rooted in the Southern Province of Zambia, in communities where clinics are overextended, schools are full and young people are navigating powerful cultural expectations alongside rapid change. New sites are identified together with our local partners and government entities.
Chidi
Zimba district
Once a clinic where one nurse served roughly 11,000 people, Chidi has been renovated as a model health center with a youth corner, upgraded infrastructure and a network of trained community-based volunteers. Teen births have begun to decline, and young leaders meet regularly to keep the space alive.
Simonga
Our first youth-friendly space and now a “center of excellence,” where the teen corner helped lift the clinic from post to center, staffing nearly doubled, and student ambassadors host after-school activities, sports, theater and outreach to surrounding villages.
Botoka and Mubuyu
Choma district
Two very large, over-subscribed rural clinics chosen by the Ministry of Health as the next sites for youth corners. Beginning in 2026, our donations will help finance youth-friendly spaces as part of major renovations that bring adolescent care closer to thousands of young people.
Mapatizya
An almost unimaginably remote clinic, five hours from Livingstone, now renovated with a youth-friendly room, maternity annex, sanitation, solar power and water. Tonga Teen Corners has funded the youth corner, and twenty peer educators have been selected to begin training.
On Call Africa
Our principal local NGO partner, with more than a decade of experience strengthening rural health systems in Zambia. On Call Africa leads renovations, coordinates youth training and works hand in hand with the Ministry of Health so that our youth corners sit inside a stronger, more resilient health system.
Livingstone District Health Office
The Ministry of Health’s leadership team for primary care in the district where we began. Their guidance aligns each youth-friendly space with national priorities in adolescent health and helps embed teen ambassadors into existing public health programs.
Quiet Waters
Charles & Emma Stewart
A locally owned transport company in Simonga whose owners first invited us to see the needs and potential of young people in the area. Their long-standing service to schools, clinics and community initiatives has grounded this project in the daily life of the district.
How you can help
This work exists because a small circle of friends, families and colleagues chose to stand beside young people in villages they may never see.
