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Trust Freddy

Herald Correspondent 

After realising how Covid-19 ravaged the education system and widened the gap between rural and urban learners, pupils at Maranatha Christian High School in Harare have invented a learning application that is adaptable to any setting.

The application, which comes under the pupils’ own company known as Hekima Inc, is named Study Buddie and is so flexible that it simply requires the user to have an android device and they can easily access educational material. 

On the application, the learners can communicate with their teachers, chat with their friends, schedule their study periods, share notes with fellow learners and even take a break to play short games to refresh. 

The learners from Maranatha have already won a competition at the national level with their technological innovation and they are scheduled to leave the country for Nigeria where they will compete on the continental stage at the Junior Africa Company of the Year awards from tomorrow to Sunday next week. The team won US$750 in the local competition.

Competitors in Nigeria will come from Eswatini, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. 

If they are successful, the Maranatha pupils will have an opportunity to represent Africa at the Ralph de la Vega Global Entrepreneurship Competition, which will bring together winners from the six regions of the world. 

To aid the team’s success, people can visit videos of the work on Youtube under Hekima Inc to like, comment and share, since some of the judging will be based on the attention the videos get on the social media platform. 

The Maranatha High School team is made up of four Lower Sixth pupils — Tinovonga Sagonda (17), Blessing Bvunzawabaya (19), In’utu Mubiana (18) and Kudzai Katambarare (17) and it defeated 15 other high schools at the national competition. 

The young innovators said they were inspired by Covid-19 which crippled the education sector to develop the Study Buddie. 

“We identified many loopholes in education during and after Covid-19 and examination boards like Cambridge and Zimsec had record breaking low pass rates for the past two years because of the pandemic that struck the earth,” Sagonda, who is the chief executive officer of Hekima Inc said. 

“Yes, anyone can access information on internet, but our App is unique in the sense that everything is simplified and the application works in all android devices.” 

The team was also inspired by the story their fellow, Mubiana, who is the production director of their company, who lost her precious study time battling for life in hospital. 

“Growing up I used to be in and out of hospital because of illness, so the ordeal that I went through made us to come up with a solution to access learning wherever one is,” said Mubiana. 

“We decided to decentralise the education system so that everyone can access summarised information  while in hospital or wherever.” 

Bvunzawabaya said they were looking forward to conquer in Nigeria and would invest the cash prize in enhancing their application. 

“Our aim is to provide assistance to other schools in rural areas because most of them are struggling to buy books, pens and other stationery,” said Bvunzawabaya. 

Maranatha Christian High School head Mr Evermore Chakwizira said he was proud of the team and urged everyone to like and share Hekima Inc videos on Youtube to enhance the team’s success in Nigeria. 

“There shall be public choice awards, the voting is now open and will be counted using Youtube engagement metrics,” he said. 

“For our teams to score points, they will have to share the videos within their network and encourage people to view, like and comment on the videos.” 

Junior Africa Company is hosting the programme meant to equip senior secondary school pupils with entrepreneurial and innovative skill-set and mindset to solve problems in their communities by launching a business venture and unleashing their entrepreneurial potential. In recent times, Zimbabwean schools have been competing in innovation and winning on the world stage.