What does the Anzisha Prize Movement mean to me?

Being a part of the Anzisha Prize team means that my daily activities involve some exciting work such as traveling the African continent to meet amazing young people and sometimes it involves mundane tasks like reading long reports and printing never-ending documents. I can easily get lost in the tasks and the deliverables of the program without taking a step back to appreciate the vision of the work that we do and the change that we want to see happen on the continent.

As the year wraps up and everyone around me is reflective, I realized that my work is more than the hours that I sit behind my desk replying to emails but it’s a future that I want to see on the African continent and it means more to me than I have realised in the past. And because end-of-year reflections are lists and more lists, I came up with 5 ways in which the Anzisha Prize, in its effort to support very young entrepreneurs across the continent, is more than a Prize but a movement that is bigger than the 20 entrepreneurs that we select each year.

The Anzisha movement means that I get to tell stories of entrepreneurs like Balbina Huduma who is creating jobs for disenfranchised women her age at the age of 22. She is the founder of Huduma Smart, an enterprise that trains domestic workers and provides a job market for them via their website, where employers can recruit workers of their choice according to the qualifications given by employers and acceptability of a worker. They also provide health insurance and contracts to workers, among other necessities to make their jobs respectable.

Her dream is to have Huduma Smart reach thousands of domestic workers from rural regions all around Tanzania, enhance the quality of their services and develop their professional skills through various programs. Her vision is unwavering in wanting to eliminate domestic work violence by improving domestic worker labour laws and to make domestic work recognized nationally and worldwide as a decent job that can lead to economic growth.

Sometimes this movement feels too big for my small contribution to make any meaningful impact but I am constantly motivated by the people that I work with and other organisations who are in very big ways, contributing to the fight against unemployment through their hard work. Organisations like Junior Achievement and the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation.

Hear me try and explain this, albeit less articulately :), in the Anzisha Prize documentarily I have posted below. But more importantly, watch the stories of entrepreneurs like Balbina and make them your reference point on what entrepreneurship could and should look like.

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