Train 1,000 Zimbabwean Students On Leadership

Our vision is to a build a generation of socially responsible citizens in Zimbabwe. In our efforts to achieve this, we initiate a variety of activities. In this report, we share about several great platforms we engaged in.

Facilitator Reflection Meeting

At the end of the academic school term, we were very pleased to celebrate with our forty facilitators who we deploy to work in our forty partner schools in Bulawayo, Gweru, Tsholotsho and Umzingwane. First, we enjoyed a great term of deep learning with them.

We held a reflection meeting for our facilitators at the scenic Hillside Dams. The main objective of the meeting was to encourage our team to critically reflect on the experience of being a facilitator and how they can use key lessons they have learned in the next school term.

The three critical areas of reflection were as follows:

The importance of guiding students through a learning process as they delivered our leadership and training program.

The importance of providing mutual support to each other as facilitators

This is a great learning opportunity for them as well

Our facilitators shared insightful lessons on all three areas and more. The team fully understands the vitality of their role as a facilitator and how they need each other as support systems in order to achieve set objectives. Lastly, the team acknowledged that their involvement with Lead Us Today is an opportunity to grow personally and acquire essential life skills before they head off to university.

Finally, they challenged each other to continue to but their best foot forward while constantly looking out for opportunities to provide innovative solutions to the problems around them.

LeadTalks: Rethinking Career Pathways

Our fifth LeadTalk featured two inspiring young people from Bulawayo.

The first speaker was Takunda Chingonzoh, an entrepreneur who shared a stage with President Barack Obama at the US-Africa Business Forum in August 2014, as a Mandela Washington Fellow. Takunda is the Founder of Neolab Technologies, a Zimbabwean incubator that is incubating some of the country’s most innovative start-ups. The second was Ernest Mackina, a Rotaractor who recently returned from a trip to India where he represented Zimbabwe at the Spark Conference in Mumbai. They both discussed thinking of career pathways in more creative and imaginative ways than we may have previously done.

Takunda highlighted how the changes in Zimbabwe’s economy have left very few jobs in the formal sector and urged many young people to look into entrepreneurship. He emphasized that the only way young people can become respectable entrepreneurs making innovative products is if they invest in themselves. He implored young people in the audience: “We need to persistently better ourselves, and become better, faster, smarter, more efficient if we want to be better than the 10,000 people who are just like you who want the same job or opportunity that you are chasing after. You have to gain that competitive advantage whether it is in business or in your career”. 

Building on Takunda’s insights, Ernest added a more global perspective to the discussion. He drew from his experience of travelling to India to give a picture of how, in the future, young Africans will be competing for jobs and capital at a more global scale. As such, in developing talent, young people need to be thinking how they can be competitive in markets for ideas and jobs, such that they are able to gain attention from the world’s largest companies and biggest investors.

In all, this was a worthy and valuable LeadTalks session that generated a lot of rich conversation and challenged young people to think seriously and creatively about how they can contribute their talents in order to make the best of some of the biggest opportunities in the world.

Lead Us Today at the Skoll World Forum

A couple of weeks ago, our CEO, Dalumuzi Mhlanga had the privilege to attend the 12th Skoll World Forum at the University of Oxford. Running under the theme “Belief”, the edition had world renowned leaders such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Rev. Mpho Mtutu, Zak Ebrahim, Ophelia Dahl and Jacqueline Novogratz.

You can read more on this here

Lastly, we would like to share exciting news and extend our warm congratulations to the  following facilitators for their admissions to US universities:

• Alvin Chitena – Wesleyan University
• Liqhwa Ncube – University of Pennsylvania
• Charmaine Nyakonda – McGill University

If you would like to donate to Lead Us Today, please do so using the following link:http://bit.ly/SupportLUT2014