About the Project Director

My name is Molly and I was born at the onset of the second liberation struggle in 1975 in Zimbabwe. I lived with my parents, three brothers, and three sisters in the Svosve village until Zimbabwe’s independence from the British Colonial rule in 1980. It was then that we moved to the village community of Macheke where I enjoyed a simple but nourishing childhood. I left Macheke on May 26, 1995 to pursue my college education in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where I earned my Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Drexel University in 2000. That led me to New Jersey to begin my Software Test Engineering career at Lucent Technologies - a Bell Labs Innovation. After eight years in telecommunications, I transitioned to the Medical Devices industry to join a small startup company where I currently work. In 2009, I earned my Master of Science degree in Software Engineering from Monmouth University.

While my professional expertise is in software technology, I intend to take on other challenges in sustainability as it relates to agriculture, public health, and education. For the past three years I have been researching and devising a poverty alleviation project for my native community of Macheke. I maintain a blog that seeks to make Macheke visible and, while at Monmouth University, I built an alliance with professors and students who have been supporting the Macheke Sustainability Project through the Institute for Global Understanding. The Monmouth University Magazine published an article about this project.

I now live in Kendall Park, New Jersey, and thoroughly value visits with my family and friends in Zimbabwe whenever I can. When not working, studying, or researching the project, I enjoy laughter with friends, traveling to sunshine places, and writing my book on story collections from my Zimbabwean childhood. I feel honored to be on this journey and look forward to making a real difference in many people’s lives!