For Audrey Simbiso Chidawanyika, the key to monumental impact starts with a philosophy she calls life/work balance. As she puts it, “People call it work/life balance – for me, it’s life/work balance. I can’t show up to work if my life is a mess. Life begins, then work comes.”
This deep commitment to personal well-being is what has fueled her ability to manage powerful roles, including her former position as Chief of Staff to the Executive Director at AfriLabs and her ongoing work as the Founder of the Simbiso Jumpstart Initiative.

Audrey’s path to becoming a global educator on innovation and enterprise development is rooted in her upbringing in Harare, Zimbabwe. Her family survived on entrepreneurial initiatives, but the instability of those ventures left a lasting impression.

“These businesses had potential. But because my parents never had business knowledge, they could not sustain them. The businesses constantly died, and we were going from one on to the next,” she recalls. “If we had focused; if my parents had had business knowledge, they could have built businesses that would have grown, and created jobs,” she reflects.

The call to public service was solidified in 2005 during Operation Restore Order, which destroyed her community. Witnessing the ensuing destitution and meeting the UN envoy inspired her to act. “Because I was frustrated by what was happening, seeing that people could be left homeless, stranded… I felt certain that I wanted to be a part of public service,” she says.

This experience spurred her to study commerce and join Enactus, which she says “really sparked this whole interest in me, because we were going into communities and creating possibilities.” The desire to build sustainable enterprises is in her DNA, driven by the belief that “oh, we can actually build powerful enterprises in Africa, by Africans.”

She is a distinguished leader, serving as a mentor for the British Council and a team lead for an entrepreneurship sport organisation. Her work has earned her the title of 2022 Africa 40 under 40 Awards recipient under Professional Services and the 2020 JCI Ten Outstanding Young Persons in Zimbabwe honouree.

Insights for Ecosystem Builders: A Q&A with Audrey Chidawanyika 💡

On Unifying the Ecosystem

Q: You hold two powerful roles: one continental, one grassroots. How do these worlds inform each other?

A: They are not two worlds; they are one ecosystem seen from different altitudes. My grassroots work with Simbiso Jumpstart Initiative keeps me rooted in the reality of young people, their hustle, hope, and hunger to create, where I see the barriers they face in raw, unfiltered terms.

Conversely, my role at AfriLabs gave me a seat at continental tables “where policy, investment, and infrastructure are being shaped”.

“What I’ve learned is that policy must be people-centered, and community work must be system-aware.”

I intentionally carry the stories and struggles of grassroots founders into policy rooms and take the tools and strategies from those rooms back to the communities. “That’s how we bridge, not by choosing one or the other, but by flowing between both intentionally and unapologetically.”

On the Relevance Gap in Education

Q: What’s one common barrier youth face in entrepreneurship education across the continent and how can ecosystem actors address it?

A: One word: RELEVANCE.

Too often, entrepreneurship education is theoretical, westernised, or detached from local markets. It teaches models, but not mindsets. It offers frameworks but not access to real-world problems youth can solve or build for.

Ecosystem actors must “co-design education with young people, not just for them.” This means investing in contextual learning, community-based role models, and opportunities to build while learning. We need to move “from the classroom to the marketplace and let young people prototype, fail fast, build again, and scale with support that speaks their language.”

On the Power of Belief

Q: What’s a breakthrough you’ve seen through Simbiso Jumpstart Initiative that continues to inspire you?

A: One moment that lives rent-free in my heart was when a young man built sustainable lighting from recycled plastic bottles and electronic waste. This initiative brought light to impoverished communities across Zimbabwe.

That was not just about skills. It was about unlocking identity. At Simbiso Jumpstart, we don’t just teach business; we light fires.

“That breakthrough reminds me every day: if we dare to believe in young Africans at the grassroots, they will build global solutions from local realities.”

Closing Advice for Program Leaders

Q: What advice would you give to entrepreneurship program leaders working in underserved communities?

A: Start by listening; deeply. The most powerful solutions come from the ground, not from top-down assumptions. Then build with the mindset of a systems architect, following these principles:

• Create platforms, not just programs.
• Build circles, not silos.
• Center dignity, not pity.

“Underserved doesn’t mean unworthy, it means underinvested in.”

Your role is to build trust, unlock value, and connect those communities to broader ecosystems of support, capital, and visibility. “That’s how movements start. That’s how we change Africa.”

Watch Audrey Simbiso Chidawanyika in Action

To gain more actionable strategies on building comprehensive ecosystems, watch Audrey’s session at the Anzisha Entrepreneurship Education Africa (EEA) Summit: Designing Africa’s Digital Destiny: From Innovation to Inclusive Prosperity.

This session, recorded at the August 2024 summit, focuses on how ecosystem actors can move beyond scattered interventions to holistic, ecosystem-wide transformation, mobilising innovation communities to shape Africa’s digital future.