After El Mahdi participated in MEPI Student Leaders program of 2015, he joined the Environmental Youth Program (EYA) project campaigning for conservation and climate change action through social media, video production, and community events, along with a group of six Moroccan young activists mentored by local NGO Dar Si Hmad. El Mahdi started as a team member in May 2016 before taking the lead on the initiative. The EYA project was showcased at the UN Climate Change conference in Marrakesh and El Mahdi’s team members were among Dar Si Hmad booth facilitators at the conference, presenting its awarding-winning fog-harvesting project to hundreds of Moroccan and foreign visitors – fog-harvesting is an innovative technology based on the fact that water can be collected from fogs under favorable climatic conditions.
In just six months, El Mahdi and his team organized four local environmental awareness events in Agadir engaging more than 100 local young people. He also helped build an online audience of thousands of followers on social media platforms, where he published original multimedia, multilingual content, in addition to participating in various environmental events across Morocco.
Through his environmental activism work, El Mahdi took part in an executive education program at the American University in Cairo (AUC) School of Global Affairs & Public Policy with a full scholarship and spoke at the American Middle Eastern Network for Dialogue at Stanford university (AMENDS) prestigious conference that took place at the University of Oxford in June 2017.
“MEPI provided me with the tools and resources to make my dreams come to life. It made me biased towards action and making a change” says El Mahdi Lafram.
