Hello, my name is Maudy Shingirai and I’m an entrepreneur from Zimbabwe, attending the 1st edition of the Global MBA in Impact Entrepreneurship in Harare at Catholic University of Zimbabwe.
On the 21st of February, with a group of entrepreneurs of my class I left for Europe. Little did we know that, what was supposed to be an opportunity for business networking in Milan would be distorted by the unprecedented COVID-19 virus that began to spread across Europe.
Fast forward two weeks and 6 countries later, we made it back to Zimbabwe safe and sound; but I was required to be in quarantine at home for 21 days before I could return to work. Having seen the devastation the virus was causing in other parts of the world, I decided to read up on it and use the opportunity to launch abcAfrica‘s first online course.
Quarantine created the perfect opportunity to bring to life what has been a business idea since the start of the E4Impact MBA programme. I managed to get approval from the World Health Organisation to use their content for the online course, in a bid to ensure that people would get the correct information. The next step was creating a temporary platform with the capability to facilitate online learning, which was done a couple of sleepless nights later (the jet lag helped disrupt my sleep pattern); then lastly creating the actual courses. The aim was to create informative, interactive content about COVID-19, that could reach locals, in local languages as well, before the virus did!
There was a lot of fear and misinformation going around and the feedback from those who went through the short courses was humbling to say the least. The site also had links to the Ministry of Health contact details, as well as a resource section with informative videos on situation updates, how to wash hands properly etc. This whole experience energised my passion to leverage technology for education, beyond just academic content, but also knowledge creation for societal development.
I had lots of encouragement and advice on how to go about this (and do it quickly) from fellow classmates, which really showed how much easier it is for us to achieve impact in society with our ideas, when we work together. The abcAfrica vision is coming to life and we intend to have officially launched a new platform in the next few weeks.
Learn more on abcAfrica
Facebook page: @abcAfrica.co
