Kudakwashe Foya

Kudakwashe Foya is a sociology student at the University of Zimbabwe. Due to limited funds, Kudakwashe took up teaching at a multiracial Institution called Tutorial Home to fund her studies. Teaching now for four years, she has taught over 110 students and has facilitated a 93% university admission rate in her first year of coaching for university admission examinations. Kudakwashe’s teaching extended to mentoring startups built on the foundation of having co-founded a startup called Homie Bot. Homie Bot is a chatbot and mediation service that is integrated within popular social media platforms, which engages tenants at risk of eviction to prevent them from becoming homeless. Homie Bot directly connects tenants to mediators, who provide tailored support and facilitates negotiations with landlords, in order to find affordable solutions and allow the tenants to remain in their homes. AS a result of her experiences with Homie Bot, she continued her mentoring journey with the MIT grand hackathon where she mentored several teams who were proposing several solutions toward solving problems people face within healthcare and education.

Kudakwashe has also co-founded a non-profit called the LA initiative. The LA initiative was born from the need to make information and opportunities to develop 21st century skills more accessible to her peers. She noticed her peers did not know much about skills like constructing a competent resume, cover letters and even some principles of financial literacy. Therefore, the LA initiative provides access to this expertise through free monthly conferences that engage accomplished professionals to share their experiences and skills. The LA initiative in conjunction with Global Integrity has also set up an opportunity to allow youth to gain free access to training in the basics of web development, business development and financial literacy training during the 2022 fall intake. The LA initiative has impacted the lives of nearly 500 young people spread across 7 different countries.

She is also working as the President of a youth-led initiative called the Youth Vision Overload. This organization seeks to nurture content creators that create content that reflects the challenges faced by the youth and offers solutions to those problems. Youth Vision Overload has content creators from five different countries, speaking on issues ranging from mental health to entrepreneurship and finances, with an approximate reach of 50 youths from different parts of the world, though this is growing rapidly. Youth Vision Overload wishes to extend its reach to include platforms like podcasts, youtube sessions to further enhance the reach of its ideas and provide a space for multicultural collaboration.

She is currently the peace first ambassador for Zimbabwe and l mentors youth-led projects and initiatives to help them develop their ideas and eventually apply the mini-grant funding opportunity that Peace First offers. So far she is working with four youth-led initiatives within this capacity such as the Iyarty Foundation and Dominant Graphics.

Kudakwashe’s dream is to foster conditions that allow lifelong learning for herself and others as well as create mentorship environments that propel impactful social development projects and initiatives.