They are an Africa-based social impact organisation committed to investing in the future of children through Education. The Foundation is working to scale its impact across Africa by raising 2 million African leaders by 2020. The Foundation targets orphans and vulnerable children, as well as students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and focuses its work in education on the three key areas of Providing Access to education, Improving Quality of education and Providing Lifelong Development.

Where Everything Started

In 1990 Mr. Strive Masiyiwa, ran a construction business and began losing staff to HIV/Aids and was led to fend for the staff’s orphaned children. Faced with such challenges, Mrs. Tsitsi Masiyiwa, his wife, realized that for her to really understand the plight of orphaned children, she needed to spend time, “going where they were”, “eating what they ate”, “sleeping where they slept” and “listening to their stories”; It is this effort invested into knowing orphaned children through visiting a children’s home in Gokwe – Zimbabwe, that sparked the work Higherlife Foundation is doing today.

During her stay at this children’s home she discovered that most of the children in children’s home were abandoned in their infancy, had never received visitors in their life at the home, had the bare minimum for a meal and rarely had meat with their meals. They had no time to play and spent most of their time performing household chores and agricultural tasks. Many of these children also struggled with finding school fees and of those who went to school, they struggled to match the academic performance of children that came from two parent families. This experience brought to life Higherlife Foundation.

Vision