On 30 March 2026, Dr. Thokozile Mbaya and team from HEARD brought together representatives from the KZN Departments of Health, Social Development, and Education, the Office of the Premier, The South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG), the United States President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and KZN civil society to close out the Asenze Impilo study and to ask: what now?

The meeting marked the end of a year-long journey to co-design mental health and psychosocial support interventions for adolescents and young adults (AYA) in KZN. That journey began stakeholder inception meeting in April 2025. What emerged from this meeting was a picture of committed colleagues working within a system under strain: too few psychologists covering too many schools, screening tools too long to be practical, and a persistent disconnect between departments that often ran parallel programmes without knowing it. This was followed by a series of Human-Centred Design workshops with 15 young people and 12 caregivers from the Valley of a Thousand Hills.

What young people told us was clear: services exist, but they are largely invisible. Stigma, broken confidentiality, economic constraints and a lack of awareness keep young people away, even when help is available. Caregivers, many sharing their own experiences for the first time, revealed how unprocessed intergenerational trauma shapes the home environments young people grow up in.

Working directly with communities, three co-designed interventions emerged: Speak Out Boxes for anonymous help-seeking, Gendered Safe Spaces for sustained peer support, and Peer Champions, voted the most practical, to build trust, reduce stigma, and connect young people to services.

The final stakeholder meeting presented these findings and opened a rich conversation about possibilities of implementation. Colleagues grappled with the realities of overstretched systems, the urgent need for a validated mental health screening tool for under-18s, and how the Peer Champion model could be embedded across existing departmental structures. The Office of the Premier pointed to an existing provincial youth strategy as a vehicle for alignment, a reminder that the goal is to strengthen what exists, not reinvent it.

The Asenze Impilo study is wrapping up its current phase, with findings to be made publicly available. But the conversation it started is far from over. The evidence is here. The next step is using it.