How do you launch a school when students have limited access to electricity, let alone the internet? Pile on the pandemic, and the challenge that faced Elizabeth Dearborn Hughes and her team last year becomes monumental. Dearborn Hughes is the CEO and co-founder of Davis College, a new co-educational university in Kigali, Rwanda, which launched while the country was under lockdown and Dearborn Hughes was in Hong Kong, where she lives.

When Dearborn Hughes first began volunteering in Rwanda in 2006, only 1 per cent of Rwandans went to university and less than 30 per cent of them were women. It was this lack of opportunities that spurred her and her now husband, Dave Hughes, to co-found the Akilah Institute for Women, Rwanda’s first women-only university, which opened in 2010 to foster a new generation of female leaders. The schools’ approach involves not only academia, but also giving students the skills to tackle the myriad challenges facing the region.

“We give them both the practical, hands-on experience and the academic foundation of critical thinking and communication to help them in their careers,” Dearborn Hughes says. All Davis students take a sustainability course to learn about climate change. “We want our students to know what’s going to happen in their lifetime,” she adds. “We prepare them to navigate those challenges.”