Girl Power

Plenty of 60 year olds in Nyasha Gwatidzo’s shoes would be thinking about retirement. She has grandchildren to enjoy, a beautiful farm in the English countryside and, judging by the size of her business empire, enough money to do anything she wants. But Nyasha has no plans to stop.

“We’re growing all the time, every day,” she says. “We’re never stagnant. We’re growing in our thoughts and how we feel. Our values also change as we get older. We’re so easily influenced as we’re growing up; I was very influenced by my parents. They were very strong personalities, very ambitious for us as children, as potential African leaders. So that was such a huge responsibility from a very young age. And then as you get older you find your own space, your own niche.”

Nyasha’s parents, born in Rusape and Nyanga, were both teachers and dedicated freedom fighters. When Nyasha was young, Robert Mugabe visited the family home – Nyasha remembers having breakfast with him – and her father helped to smuggle him over the border into Mozambique. When Rhodesia got too dangerous, the family moved to the north of England, though her mother did return home in 1980 to campaign for Mugabe’s ZANU party in the country’s first election after Independence.
Nyasha did well at school and university and started a PhD in chemistry but her heart wasn’t in it. She wanted to work with people, children especially, so she quit and trained as a social worker and psychotherapist. A job working for Westminster council in London followed, but budget cuts in the recession of the early Nineties meant she soon found herself unemployed.

She was given an £800 redundancy pay-out – more money than she had ever had – but it wasn’t quite enough to start the business she dreamed of: a children’s home where she could care for traumatised, unaccompanied minors. On top of the usual, tragic cases that passed her desk as a social worker in London, Nyasha had seen children arriving alone into Heathrow or Southampton, their desperate parents having saved enough money to fly or ship them out of their war-torn home countries. Driven by her own memories of arriving in the UK – the shock of the cold weather and the (possibly even colder) culture – Nyasha couldn’t imagine how these children were able to survive without their parents. She was determined to give them love, care and a safe place to live.

Nyasha says that her lack of money was her superpower: “You need to have nothing,” she says. “If you’ve got lots of money, if you’re comfortable, why should you start a business? Having nothing makes you hungry and that is a resource in itself. You need the comfort of nothing. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, it was just determination that kept me going.”

Determination – and a generous vicar who let her use his home in south London rent-free for three months. She then got a small community loan which she used to form a team of trained therapists, and six months later she was turning over £1m. Local councils were desperate for the service she was providing and she could scarcely keep up with demand.

“I always say that when you’ve got a passion and purpose in life and you provide a service or a gadget – it doesn’t matter what it is – money always follows. When it comes from the heart, you don’t have to worry about how you’re going to make money out of it. People will buy into your purpose and passion. They can feel that it’s coming from a good place so they’re prepared to pay for the service, whatever it is you’re providing.”

Having established two more homes, her business soon became a chain and in 1996 she set up the Banya Family Placement Agency, training and supporting foster parents to care for children in need. The agency has worked with more than 7,000 children and 400 carers to date. Its “disruption rate” (placements not working out and a child having to move) is less than two per cent, compared with the national average of 20 per cent. Nyasha has become a leading figure in the UK’s foster care system.

Thousands of children have passed through Nyasha’s care. “They keep me in touch with what they’re doing now,” she says, eyes sparkling. “It’s just such a pleasure and a privilege to have worked with them. They’re my unsung heroes. The things they’ve survived, I would never have survived.”

The evening before our interview, browsing testimonials from carers on Nyasha’s website, I briefly consider whether my husband and I should become foster parents in the UK. After all, I know plenty of Zimbabwean women who have other people’s children living with them. But my gut feeling says we shouldn’t. It would mean so much upheaval and impact on our own children, not to mention the financial cost. It’s just not something my English family has ever considered. Perhaps this is why Nyasha has been so successful: she has imported a part of Shona culture to the UK, skills that are so desperately needed in Britain.

“In Shona there is no word for fostering,” Nyasha explains. “It’s an alien word. A child just gets looked after if they need to be looked after. I wouldn’t think twice about living with another child who’s not blood-related to me. At the moment I’m looking after my brother’s four children after he died of Covid in 2022. I don’t know what would have happened to them if they’d come from another family.”

“This care is one of the most wonderful things about African culture,” she continues, “but it’s also a huge burden. You have to share that dollar, divide it, and it has to go a long way. In Zimbabwe, in Africa, it does go a long way for sure.” That burden is set to increase as populations across Africa boom and new job creation struggles to keep up. More than ten million young Africans enter the labour market every year, but only three million new jobs are created, forcing working-age adults, many of them parents, overseas in search of work.

The thought of it keeps Nyasha awake at night and has inspired her latest venture: a multimillion-dollar fund to provide female African entrepreneurs with finance to grow their businesses: to create jobs, empower women and ultimately prevent children from living in poverty. “Behind every woman there’s always going to be a child,” Nyasha says. “My goal has always been, and always will be, caring for children. So if I empower a woman and they become financially stable they’re going to feed their kids, they’re going to send them to school. The biggest impact is always going to be felt by the children.”

“I really want to stop the migration of people,” Nyasha continues. “It’s really not good for your mental health. For example there are millions of Zimbabweans in South Africa where they’re not wanted. So many young people and families from north Africa want to get to Europe but they are drowning at sea, travelling on boats designed to carry two people but there’s 20 people on board. This is all about economic wellbeing. Sometimes it’s presented as political, but in my view you have to feed yourself. It’s a basic human right. Before you can even think about the luxury of governance, about who your political leader is right now, you need to feed yourself.”

Over the past few years Nyasha has visited 29 different African countries, meeting hundreds of women who run small and medium-sized businesses and who dream of being an entrepreneur. She’s in talks with microfinance institutions and banks about potential partnerships, but money isn’t the only thing she wants to give women. One of the surprise lessons from her travels is that often women already have enough cash to get started – or they require less money than they think. What they really need is some business expertise, someone with experience off whom they can bounce ideas.

For Nyasha that person was Anita Roddick, founder of the famous cosmetics and skincare company the Body Shop. In 1991, Roddick published Body And Soul: How To Succeed In Business And Change The World, the year before Nyasha launched her first business. “I read everything Anita wrote,” Nyasha says. “She was my virtual mentor. She never knew it but I was watching her. Everybody needs a mentor or a coach. That person doesn’t have to be a formal person, it can be your best friend, your mum, your dad, just someone you can talk to about your plans.”

“I don’t want to get two or three jobs going, I want to create millions of jobs,” she continues. “If someone has a decent job, especially if they live in Africa, I know that it will have an impact, I’ve done the multipliers. About 30 people are impacted by one person, then that effect gets multiplied by 30 because they’re not just feeding their own immediate family, but they’re looking after their cousins and nieces too. I saw it with my mother and I’m doing it myself. My charity work is an extension of my family.”

Stopping migration, creating millions of jobs, protecting basic human rights: Nyasha’s vision wouldn’t be out of place on a presidential manifesto. But she doesn’t talk like a politician, far from it; Nyasha presents her ambitious plan to help alleviate poverty across Africa clearly and pragmatically.

“We’ve done the politics,” she says. “I grew up in a very political family. Everything we did was political. We followed the political path and it’s not working.” Despite running a large foundation in the UK – the Vana Trust, which supports people with learning disabilities, autism and mental health issues, and in Zimbabwe where it sponsors children to go to school – Nyasha believes that charity and aid are also failing Africa. “We’ve been doing it for such a long time,” she says. “We need to think of alternatives to charity and aid. We need to question why it isn’t working and stop pouring billions of pounds into those industries.”

Nyasha’s alternative to politics and charity feels tantalisingly within reach: ethical, female-run businesses creating millions of quality jobs, financed by a Zimbabwean woman who started out with a small loan and a big heart. It’s not hard to imagine future African entrepreneurs citing Nyasha as their inspiration, their virtual mentor, especially with the forthcoming publication of her book Scaling For Good: Six Ultimate Strategies To Grow Your Business.

“What would you say to the 25-year-old you?” I ask Nyasha. “What advice would you give that young woman setting out with no money and a big dream?” Her answer reflects the modesty and kindness that have become her hallmark. It also reflects the ambition of millions of African women like her: “It’s simple really,” she says. “I’d say, ‘If I can do it, so can you.’”

If even a fraction of those women achieve the same success as Nyasha then her optimism – that her generation “will see a different Africa to the one I was born into” – will not be misplaced.

Words by Charlotte Ashton

For more information, visit:
www.nyashagwatidzo.com

GIRL POWER