doesn't spend her time decorating herself with designer clothes and
expensive jewellery, treating herself to Louis Vuitton handbags or
giving her mansion a makeover. The wife of Zimbabwean telecoms
magnate, Strive Masiyiwa is more often found in one of her offices,
meeting with students and other beneficiaries – prospective and
current – of her education philanthropy. Masiyiwa is the founding
director and executive chairperson of the Higher Life Foundation,
which oversees five trusts that together fund thousands of
scholarships for medical students and disadvantaged children across
Southern Africa.
According to Tsitsi, the idea to launch the foundation was paradoxical
and came to her when she and her husband were struggling financially
in the mid- to-late nineties. "My husband had applied for a licence to
operate a mobile phone company in Zimbabwe," she says. "But for
reasons that were not clear to us, the application for the licence was
rejected. Then my husband sued the government. That is when our
problems started. You cannot sue the government and think things will
always be right." Tsitsi says they lost everything during this period
and could not even offer their visitors tea. "In trying to understand
what was going on around me, I began to do intensive soul searching,"
she says.
"Then I prayed: if God can give me the licence, then I will help the
poor with the money."
In 2000, Strive Masiyiwa finally obtained the licence to operate
Zimbabwe's mobile phone company, Econet. "My husband was paid a bonus.
I took the bonus and gathered orphans from all over Zimbabwe and threw
a party for 600 people," Tsitsi says, adding that the couple held
similar events for three years. "It was not about the parties per se
but more about what happened after the parties. We then decided to set
up a scholarship fund, and this fulfilled what I was feeling. I went
to orphanages and lived with the children, ate what they ate," she
says.
These were the beginnings of the Higher Life Foundation. Today, its
five trusts, which operate in Zimbabwe, Burundi, Lesotho and South
Africa, include Capernaum Trust and Capernaum Trust International,
which fund education at home and overseas for disadvantaged students.
In Zimbabwe, the foundation also funds the Christian Community
Partnership Trust, which supports evangelism in Zimbabwe; the Joshua
Nkomo Scholarship Fund, which identifies future community leaders; and
the National Healthcare Trust of Zimbabwe, which funds scholarships
for medical students.
Econet has operations in the above-mentioned countries as well as
Botswana and Nigeria. According to Tsitsi, the foundation wants to
expand into all the English-speaking countries of the African
continent in the near future. "As Econet is backing us financially, we
now want to go where Econet has operations," she says. "But in the
next few years we will be in a lot more countries even where it has no
operations. Countries that have Internet access are our target."
The trusts are directly funded by the Masiyiwas, together with other
investors. While Tsitsi is unable to reveal the amount of money that
has gone into the trusts she is quick to add that funding does not
come directly from Econet or its business partnerships, but that the
organisation itself invests in various financial instruments.
If the foundation has ambitions to fund programmes across Africa, its
reach is already global. Its largest programme, the Capernaum Trust,
assists over 40,000 children, many of them orphans. The Trust's
"History Makers," as they are called, receive scholarships that take
them through tertiary education, along with food and medical
assistance. Many of the students attend international schools that
prepare them for universities worldwide. Indeed several Capernaum
Trust students have been admitted to high-end, international
institutions including Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Cambridge. The
foundation also funds higher-education scholarships for History Makers
at Morehouse College, a historically black men's college in the United
States. In Zimbabwe, the foundation has collaborated with the UK's
Council for Assisting Refugee Academics to set up a Virtual Learning
Centre for medical students at the University of Zimbabwe, bringing
excellent education to the politically troubled country.
Tsitsi sees her work as complementing what governments do, rather than
competing with it. "We prefer to work with governments. We cannot
change the lives of the people if we do not collaborate with
respective governments," she says. "We are not a political party. We
provide wholesome education backing and equip these kids with life
skills." She refers to philanthropy as "the third way", following the
government and the private sector, and believes that partnerships
between different types of organisations can be very effective. "I
personally believe that relationships are beginning to work," she
says.
All this good work has its challenges which, according to Tsitsi, vary
from country to country. Some 50 percent of students from Lesotho drop
out of the foundation's education programmes, she says. "Boys mostly
leave our programmes to head cattle while girls elope to get married
early." In other countries where the Higher Life Foundation operates,
one of the major problems centres on people and families that suddenly
migrate.
Tsitsi believes in the goodness of people – Africa's businesspeople in
particular , who she says are "not selfish by any stretch of
imagination" but whom she calls on to use their skills in more
effective ways. "Philanthropists need to have good hearts," she notes,
"otherwise the continent will never look so dark."
