Student Spotlight
Rabecca Malama
Oct 29, 2024
Following the death of her father, Rabecca Malama’s life became plagued by uncertainties, bringing her family’s security and her dreams of attending university into question. After graduating high school with excellent grades, she went to extraordinary lengths in pursuit of higher education. But she couldn’t find her breakthrough, until she found Meto’s Frank Family One World Scholarship. Rabecca has now enrolled at USIU-Africa, one of the continent’s top universities.
Rabecca's Story
Rabecca Malama tried everything. Desperate to continue her education beyond high school, she applied to every opportunity that could take her toward her dream. Even when it meant enrolling into a grueling military training academy and selling her phone to cover the cost of transportation to get there, Rabecca stayed determined. Painfully close, Rabecca would try again and again over the course of four years but could not find her breakthrough.
Rabecca had always dreamed of attending a university. Supported by her father, a secondary school teacher, this dream seemed in sight. But then Rabecca's father passed when she was in 8th grade, and so began a series of upheavals to her relatively smooth family life and educational journey. “After my father passed away, completing my education became a doubt to me,” Rabecca says. “I started thinking, ‘How am I going to make it? How am I going to pursue my dreams and become what I always wanted to be?’”
In her father's absence, Rabecca's mother, previously a stay-at-home mom, assumed responsibility for their family. Determined to see her children through at least secondary school, she eventually began a small trade selling homemade fritters, a popular snack in Zambia. Rabecca recounts that her mother saw many hard days having to cater to everyone and everything. What little she generated from her trade, she had to split across food, rent, school fees, and anything else that came up.
“At the time we didn't have free education in Zambia, so we had to pay for everything,” Rabecca explains. “Because we are a big family with many things to look after, Mom would have to consider what we were going to eat, what she would use to pay for the house, and then also school fees. Sometimes we starved [so we could afford school], not eating maybe for a day.”
Bearing witness to her mother's struggles, Rabecca's zeal to achieve her dreams heightened. She increased her efforts at school, helped her mother in trade, and assisted with her siblings. In 2020, Rabecca completed secondary school with excellent grades. Lacking the means to enroll into university, she took a teaching job in another town eight hours away from her hometown, intending to split her earnings between helping her family and saving to go back to school one day.
While she worked, Rabecca consistently researched opportunities that would allow her to continue her education. She applied to jobs as well as national and international scholarships. After numerous hopeful applications and painful rejections, Rabecca finally got acceptance into a government college nursing program which covered 75% of the fees. She dragged through the program for a semester, barely able to cover the remaining 25% – which basically included buying a lab coat, books, making copies of assignments, etc. – and eventually ended up having to defer her admissions in order to make enough money to cover the 25% gap.
Rabecca thought she had found a breakthrough when she discovered that she could earn considerably more than her teaching job by enrolling into the military. In September 2022, Rabecca applied for admissions into military training; she was accepted and enrolled around a year later. When many other participants gave up and abandoned the program because of its intensity, Rabecca endured, bearing in mind her goal. But an unfortunate end awaited her.
“Right before the swearing-in ceremony where I would have been pinned as an officer, the admin in charge did a final roll call and announced everybody’s names except mine,” Rabecca says. “This was shocking and hurtful for me because every morning when they did roll call before training my name was called. I wasn’t allowed to swear-in… because I didn’t have college qualifications. They gave me nothing, not even transportation to go home, and home was far away. Even to get to training I had to sell my phone to raise money for transportation.”
Rabecca began to reexamine her dreams, but her resilience did not waver. “If I couldn't go to university, my plan was to take teaching lessons so I would be able to continue to teach,” she explains. “With my salary I would continue to help Mom and my siblings. Maybe I could even invest in a small business to add on just to continue saving so that one day I could take myself to school.” In the wake of all of this, her search for opportunities continued and finally she came upon Meto's Frank Family One World Scholarship program.
Her application wowed the Meto team. “Rabecca’s positive mindset and attitude stood out to us,” says Neema Mollel, Meto’s associate director of scholarship programs. “We were inspired by how she worked tirelessly to find different means through which to raise funds for her education and how she held tight to the hope that one day she’d be able to go to school again.”
In the interview process, it became clear that Rabecca’s dream for tertiary education wasn’t a solitary dream, but rather a dream enthusiastically shared by her family, for whom the opportunity also held much hope and promise. “We’ve never seen anything like it,” Neema explains. “During interviews, her family would all be gathered behind her and they would clap for her every time she responded.”
After a long and competitive process, Rabecca was chosen as one of four FFOWS scholars. “I'm so humbled by this opportunity,” she says. “It’s a miracle, and it’s healing me from wounds I've been passing through ever since childhood. It's digging me and my family out of our situation because I know if I get educated, it's not only me that is going to benefit, but also my family, my community, my country, even people that I don't know. Through the course that I'm going to do, I'm going to help a lot of people.”
With Meto’s support, Rabecca applied and was accepted by the United States International University Africa (USIU-Africa), one of the top universities in Africa. Fully funded by the scholarship, she moved to Nairobi, Kenya in August 2024 and is currently pursuing her undergraduate studies in the Pharmacy program.
“I never imagined I could even go to a university,” Rabecca says. “Though I had hope that one day it would happen, I wasn't sure it would. I thought maybe I could attend a [vocational] college. So being admitted to the university was like a dream come true, something I can’t even explain.”
Now at USIU-Africa, Rabecca is impressed by the academic learning environment and motivated to get the best results from her studies and the school’s international community, which she describes as “vibrant, warm, and hospitable.”
“I am impressed by the school’s facilities such as the modern library and self-contained laboratories because they give me a learning advantage I never had before,” she says. “I am also impressed with the methods of teaching.”
Upon completing her university studies, Rabecca hopes to work to improve the standard of living in her family, community, and country. In addition to getting a job/internship that would strategically position her for this, she hopes to build her own pharma business and make vital medicine accessible to people in local communities. She also dreams of one day providing financial support to other young Africans who do not have the means to take themselves to school.
“USIU-Africa is the best place I've ever been to,” Rabecca says. “We have a vibrant faculty and the best infrastructures. I am hoping to obtain the best knowledge and skills which I can take to my community and give back. And not just my community but the nation at large and even internationally. So far I haven’t encountered anything that seems like an obstacle to my success. The path has been made for me. All I need to do is work hard. It’s all up to me now.”
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