Winner of the 2024 award

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Forget Shareka, who grew up in a rural area in Zimbabwe was raised by her late grandmother. She attended a school there and later joined a secondary school under the sponsorship of NGO CAMFED.

She studied Agricultural Science in Costa Rica and her Masters degree in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Edinburgh Business School. In 2018, with her one-year professional work experience, she helped five farmers successfully establish business enterprises through capacity building in business administration, agro-processing, financial literacy, and marketing.

Since then, Forget has been taking a lead in innovative initiatives and implementation of practical solutions in sustainable agribusiness, community development, small enterprises, and climate innovation field.

She is the Founder of LiHFA (Life Hope Future Association), which offers sustainable community development through education, agribusiness, youth and women empowerment; and is Co-founder and Business Development Director for Chashi Foods. Using renewable energy, the company endeavours to produce natural, highly nutritious, and tasty dried fruits and vegetables, with the aims to strengthen food and nutrition security, tackle food waste, promote sustainable income generation, reduce poverty and create employment to rural Zimbabwean women and youth.

Forget is also a vibrant agronomic engineer and award-winning entrepreneur and environmentalist and participated in Rural Community Development, COY16 and COP26, Youth in Agribusiness, and Girls on International Platforms.

Forget is also actively involved in community projects which emphasise sustainable development, smart climate agriculture, poverty alleviation, entrepreneurship, and empowerment. Under one of these projects she co-developed an award winning smart climate agriculture guide being used by CMFED for training and benefited more than 30 000 women.

Currently, she is working  as  Environmental, Sustainability and Governance (ESG) Officer at  Viberoptix. Forget is contributing on National Determined Contributions (NDCs) consultancy under the banner of inclusion and sustainable and regenerative agriculture.

Forget Shareka was also the ‘Ellie Maxwell Award, 2021’ winner and she was named as one of the Edinburgh Climate 75.

Awards ceremony

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Forget was presented with her award by Beth Munro, the University's Alumni Volunteering and Engagement Manager, at the Edinburgh University Student Awards' on 4th April. The ceremony took place in the Pleasance. On the night, Forget spoke about her joy at winning the Being Edinburgh award:

Thank you so much for this award. I'm feeling overwhelmed with joy. I feel so appreciated, and I feel honored. It means a lot - not only to me but to where I come from and the many girls who will look up to this. It also means a lot to everyone who has contributed to my success, who has held my hand through this journey. So I'm so humbled.

This award is about motivating others, that every single small thing that you do builds up to a bigger thing. It's not going to happen in one day, it will take time, and then the right people will appreciate you. 

I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who fought for me. I did not do it alone. I did it because you were running behind me. So thank you so much, you are part of this team.

I'm now focusing more on environment, sustainability and governance, and I'm so glad to announce that I'm involved in the early stages of introducing environmental sustainability and government in the African context. So it's an exciting journey for me, because I bring different skills to the initiative that I'm working on, to make sure that we tell the African sustainability narrative in a way that is more understandable and that is more contextual to Africans.

Forget Shareka

Being Edinburgh

We would like to thank everyone who voted and campaigned for all four outstanding candidates, all of whom garnered enthusiastic support in the voting.

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