Chido Dzinotyiwei, an African languages tutor, has been placed in the top six at this year’s EO Global Student Entrepreneur Awards.
The 25-year-old University of Cape Town student beat more than 25 South African students from tertiary institutions who submitted their businesses this year and went to present her endeavour on the global stage.
The competition is open to students across the world who are running a business while completing their studies.
“My business, Vambo Academy, came about because we wanted to reteach people their mother tongue,” she said.
Dzinotyiwei, who is currently studying towards a master’s degree in development finance, said she started to teach a six-year-old boy Shona in 2019 and then more kids started pitching up for lessons.
“This kid was in my neighbourhood and the next thing we had about 17 kids we were tutoring,” she said.
But when the pandemic hit she had to rethink the business and they went online. They expanded their offering to include translations as well as indigenous knowledge banks.
“What I mean by indigenous knowledge banks is creating knowledge on African traditions like explaining lobola and the process,” she said.
To date Vambo Academy has had 460 lessons with 10 South African languages, including Zimbabwe's Shona and Ndebele.
“We will also be including Swahili soon. We currently work with 16 tutors and all our tutors are native speakers of the language and often reside where the language is entrenched, which gives authenticity,” she said.
Dzinotyiwei said her main challenge is that she is more finance educated than linguistic inclined.
“I had to do a lot of research and this was a steep learning curve on the linguistics side,” she said. But she said she loves how studying African languages helps educate on the history of different cultures.
“I love how we learn many secrets about Africa [when learning African languages] we go deeper into the language and there is so much depth there.”
Dzinotyiwei said becoming a finalist had shown her that she was ready for the world stage.
“To me it shows that I have what it takes to build a business [equipped] for the global stage. The subsequent exposure to entrepreneurs and mentors from all over the world has already had a positive impact on the business. There is a sense of validation for the hard work that has gone into it so far, with a boost in motivation for the team to keep pushing towards their bigger goals,” she said.
In the future the young entrepreneur said she wants to have many African languages represented on her platform.
“Our goal is to represent as many African languages as possible and build translation and audio tools.”
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