Mr Gray himself recognises that there’s a huge unemployment problem in Southern Africa and he wants children and young adults to become entrepreneurs to be part of a solution for the continent. After I finish my Actuarial Science degree at Stellenbosch University and hopefully get my honours, I hope to go to Harvard Business School to get my MBA. Then I want to work in a foreign country, gather experience and then come back to Namibia and employ local brain boxes to help me set up a hedge fund. If I can create employment and provide an income for families, that will be a privilege. My mantra for life may be a cliché, but I believe, ‘You work hard in silence and let success make the noise.’ I believe you need to be humble, work hard and never give up.
There are many people who go to work, clock out and go home, and that’s not something that I want to do with my life. I want to do something bigger than that. With the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation Fellowship, they help you through university to get your qualification, but they will also give you venture capital when you start your business, which is incredibly rare nowadays.
TUYENI AKWENYE I was born in Angola in 1989. My name Tuyeni means ‘Let’s go’ in Oshiwambo, because I was born three months before everybody started going back to Namibia. I went to Emma Hoogenhout Primary School in Windhoek and then to St Paul’s College. My final year of high school was the first year that Allan Gray Orbis Foundation invited Namibians to apply for the Fellowship. The application is extensive, and I took time to do it properly because I could tell that through the application process they were already identifying
a particular type of person. We were a group of four Namibians at the selection camp, where we had to do a lot of presentations and the judges were very firm. I think they wanted to test people under pressure to see how we would react. I’m a hard worker. I try my best, but I also don’t beat myself up. When I fell short, I just figured that I had tried my best. If my team presented something that was shot down by the judges, we would go back and work on it. It was a good learning curve, and very competitive, and the funny thing is that the people who we thought were going to get in actually didn’t, so obviously they weren’t looking for people who are trying to be the loudest or the smartest. It was only once I’d got into first year that I began to understand what the Foundation is trying to do. We would meet every second Saturday and do activities based on the different pillars of the Foundation. Sometimes we would focus on academic excellence, the spirit of selflessness or helping our community – things to engage our minds and develop and train us. Different facilitators came to do different sessions. Sometimes we would even run makeshift businesses. My dream is for Namibia to become a truly integrated country, and one with an excellent education system. With a small population and the amount of resources we have, I believe it is possible. We can have the best education system in SADC if we really invest in it and train our teachers. If we are able think and work together, there’s a lot we can achieve.
Allan Gray 2 Heritage Square 100 Robert Mugabe Avenue Windhoek Tel: +264 (0)61 22 1103 www.allangrayorbis.org
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