a Shift in Zimbabwe’s Economy

How Munashe Mugonda, a Farm Girl, Sparked a Shift in Zimbabwe’s Economy

Before Munashe Mugonda became a phenomenon in the Zimbabwean fintech industry, her journey started as an everyday girl who yearned for a world beyond the farm where she was born and raised.

As a child, the now Technical Lead at Cummins used to ponder and ask her father whether there was an easier way to complete their daily tasks.

She said, “I do ask my dad if there is no machine that we can instruct to do these things that we are repeatedly doing. I was always trying to look for a convenient way of doing things.”

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Her curiosity developed even further throughout high school. This made her join programming classes, not caring that she was the only girl in the class.

She was not distracted by the gender imbalance in class and graduated as one of Zimbabwe’s best students.

The opportunity to explore the world

With her exceptional programming results, Munashe Mugonda got a scholarship for talented students from low socioeconomic backgrounds to study Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at Franklin College in the United States.

“I saw this program as a way for me to travel the world and find a suitable spot to apply my abilities and follow my passion for making a change in the workplace and my home country,” she said.

Although Mungoda did not have a fully-funded scholarship, she was determined to make the most of the situation and pursue her ambition.

When her father questioned why she decided to leave Zimbabwe and choose the Franklin scholarship over the Joshua Nkomo Scholarship to the University of Zimbabwe, she told her dad she was leaving so she could return and make a positive impact.

“If there were no reason to come back home, I wouldn’t be leaving. I chose to study abroad so that one day, I could return, fully equipped to be part of the economic, social, and political progression,” she said. Indeed she returned and founded Ruzhowa SACCOS.

Building the fintech startup, Ruzhowa SACCOS

Besides working in Cummins, Munashe Mugonda is the co-founder of Ruzhowa Savings and Credit Cooperative Society (SACCOS), a Zimbabwean community fintech that allows individuals in the diaspora to invest in Zimbabwe.

The idea for Ruzhowa was conceived on a Zimbabwean Whatsapp platform where she is a member. In 2017, she realised during one of the platform’s discussions that no Zimbabweans could invest in the country.

To do that, you need to have $50 million. This gave foreign investors an edge over Zimbabweans.

She said, “When Zimbabweans invest in Zimbabwe, there is a multiplicative effect in which the money goes back into the economy, and it continues to grow”. This gap led to the creation of Ruzhowa SACCOS.

One of the startup’s notable investors is Warren Buffet.

Develop a worldview through the lens of Franklin College.

Munashe Mugonda was also a hands-on student in college. She did various internships to round out her education with real-world experience.

She worked part-time for Multiply Technology as a web developer. However, she was interested in statistical analysis and machine learning. Noticing her interest, her supervisor connected her with someone at Cummins.

She said, “In my second year of college, I did an internship under Cummins’ chemistry department. I was in a programme where I worked between 15 to 19 hours for Cummins every week and went to school simultaneously.”

While there, Cummins offered her a full-time position, which made her graduate ahead of her class and launched her career.

Today, Munashe is working on an MBA sponsored by Cummins. She says, “I appreciate that Cummins respects and honours the fact that they are working with somebody who is or is trying to juggle things.”

Each experience has enabled her to learn about America from different perspectives and broaden her horizons.

Jihan Abbas,

the Kenyan Woman Driving Transformation in Africa’s Insurance Tech

Profile || By: Oyetoun Olabisi

Jihan Abbas is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Lami Technologies, a digital insurance platform that enables the distribution and servicing of financial products.

As a graduate of Bayes Business School and the University of Oxford, Jihan stepped into the corporate world as a commodity futures trader, trading in the New York and London sugar markets in London.

Despite a satisfactory earning, Jihan Abbas was not fulfilled. According to her, she is not only motivated by money but impact.

“I worked in a job where making money was the dominant motivation. For me, that didn’t seem like enough, and it’s also not what I wanted to stand for as a human being,” she said.

Jihan, therefore, started looking for a way out of the puzzle. Luckily, the opportunity to solve a major problem presented itself while she was on vacation in Kenya.

Stepping into the insurance industry

During her conversation with a waitress, she discovered that most people do not have an insurance policy to protect them and their single source of income from unforeseen risk.

She said, “Across Africa, many people rely on a single source of income, but they aren’t protecting it using financial services like insurance, so that was one of the key things for me, thinking how can we provide a safety net for people.”

Her research further revealed that formal insurance coverage penetration in Africa was as low as 3%. The more facts she discovered about the problem besieging the insurance industry in her country and the continent at large, the more she yearned to solve the problem.

But as a young African woman and a fresh graduate yet to get the hang of the corporate world, she was scared. At the same time, she wanted to live a life of impact, one that her new discovery may have presented.

With this mindset, she quit her job in London and pursued her hunch regardless of the fears.

The creation of Griffin and Lami insurance

In 2016, Jihan Abbas founded Griffin, Kenya’s first digital-only car insurance platform. It enables people to buy and access insurance within minutes.

By 2018, she launched Lami, an insurance-as-aservice platform and Application Programming Interface (API). This allows insurers, banks and others to provide consumers with affordable and flexible digital insurance. Many businesses leverage the platform to create and process insurance products.

“We are democratising access to insurance by creating the infrastructure to facilitate others to be able to create and distribute products,” she added.

With the API, the gap between business-tobusiness (B2B) and business-to-customers (B2C) is bridged. For instance, in some banks, 94% of their transactions are conducted online except for insurance. For such, people will have to go into the bank.

Beyond the shores of Kenya

The Griffin car insurance App has been used to complete more than 10,000 policies and more than a million dollars in premiums underwritten. The company has effectively executed its B2C and B2B products with 12+ partners.

This includes Sendy, a tech-logistics company that provides end-to-end logistics for businesses by connecting them to hundreds of transporters online.

To ensure the fulfilment of its mission, Jihan Abbas acquired Bluewave Insurance Agency, an insurtech startup. Through this, she aims to bridge the insurance gap in the underserved population in Africa.

Through Bluewave’s already established presence on the continent, thousands of people from Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Nigeria, Gambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo will have access to insurance through Lami.

“We are making this investment so that we can continue to reach out to more partners across the continent, allowing us to provide more people with the policies they require,”