A promising Iowa State student is facing dismissal and deportation to Zimbabwe after the business that offered to fund her education can no longer foot the bill.
With about $40,000 in student debt, Blessing Ngara has less than a week to come up with the funds. If she can’t pay, she’ll be deported, no longer able to pursue her dreams of joining the medical field.
Forced to improvise, Ngara has quickly scrambled to raise more than $12,000 through a GoFundMe campaign called “Help Blessing complete her undergraduate studies.”
Ngara has shown impressive ambition in her educational pursuits, according to Rebecca Runyon, a director in ISU’s entrepreneurship program. She has participated in pitch competitions, undergraduate research, a hackathon and the Innovation + Entrepreneurship Academy, the organization Runyon leads.
“To sum Blessing up in one word, it’s that she’s a hustler,” Runyon told the Ames Tribune. “She works hard at everything she does, both inside and outside the classroom. She is driven not purely by her own success, but by the desire to serve others. She is very impressive.”
Academically, Ngara has excelled, earning placement on the Iowa State University Dean’s List every semester, bolstered by a GPA of 3.75 last term. Her never-say-quit attitude has been vital to her development, even leading to several prestigious honors.
“I have gained valuable experience in software engineering through participating in hackathons, including winning first place in the Clayton Farms 2022 hackathon,” Ngara said. “I am also greatly involved in entrepreneurship and, in November 2022, was the runner-up in the Food Bank of Iowa food insecurity challenge.”
Last month, Ngara presented her research at the Maize Genetics Meeting in St. Louis, Missouri, where she was one of the MaGNET award recipients. Her analysis allowed her to design a tool to assist communication for work from home professionals.
“This semester I also developed a prototype of a laptop light that makes virtual meetings more professional and well-lit, and I emerged as one of the finalists at the Young Entrepreneurship Convention,” she said.
Though Ngara is asking for financial help right now, her instinct is to remain service-minded for the benefit of others. She started a nonprofit organization in Zimbabwe called Be a Blessing, which raises money for students to attend primary school.
Funding dries up overseas
The company initially funding Ngara’s college education in Ames, Superior Quality Engineering & Technologies, is located in her home country of Zimbabwe as well as South Africa.
The COVID-19 pandemic hit the company hard, dwindling its budget and forcing them to pull back on its tuition promise, simultaneously sending Ngara into scramble mode.
“(They) never really recovered,” Ngara said. “And in Africa, especially southern Africa, there’s a lot of economic recession happening. Zimbabwe is one of the top three countries with the greatest inflation in the world.”
If Ngara can manage to pay off the $40,000 debt she owes ISU, things look bright moving forward, quite possibly making her future costs cheaper.
“I was recently accepted into the concurrent program at Iowa State, so I can work on my bachelor’s and my master’s at the same time,” she said.
The designation would make her a junior at the same time she’s working on her master’s and she’d also qualify for in-state tuition.
“So starting from next semester, things will really get better for me financially, since I’ll be getting assistantships from the school,” she said.
True to her personality, Ngara hopes to parlay her education in Ames by joining the medical field, providing service to her fellow friends and colleagues in a country in need of saving.
Blessing Ngara’s dreams of becoming a doctor are inspired by a man she never met
An untimely death prior to her berth ignited Ngara’s dream.
Although she’s been involved with technology and entrepreneurship at Iowa State, her career plan is to become a physician. She even attended medical school for a year in Zimbabwe before arriving in the United States.
Ngara’s professional ambitions are inspired by the loss of her father, who died of pneumonia when her mother was just a few months pregnant with her.
Her father’s illness shouldn’t have been fatal, Ngara said, but the diagnosis came late and made the problems difficult to treat. The frustration inspired her to take action as an adult.
“For a long time, I was angry with the doctors and the medical institutions in Zimbabwe, but then I realized I could make a change, and other children and loved ones would not have to go through the same pain I did,” Ngara said. “Being an undergraduate research assistant in the bioinformatics department, I have seen firsthand the tremendous impact computer science has on medical research.”
For example, computer scientists can use graph theory to analyze medical data, which will help them better understand human genome sequencing and create new diagnostics technology, she said.
Zimbabwe does not have enough modern technology and tech experts to improve the health sector, Ngara said, which makes her pursuit of the medical profession even more important.
The country is behind in technology to the point where Ngara had not even seen a vending machine until she came to the U.S.
If Ngara’s grass-roots efforts allow her to reach her fundraising goal, she’ll soon lead a charge to improve healthcare back home.
Though she didn’t have a chance to save her father, she’s committed to help others like him fight back.
Ronna Faaborg covers business and the arts for the Ames Tribune. Reach her at rlawless@gannett.com.