With children to look after while tirelessly managing multiple businesses, returning to school to continue education may be the farthest thing from the minds of many women.

Not only does it exhaust you, but it also has the potential to leave you feeling depleted and worn out. However, this changes when you are determined to seize the opportunity that circumstances beyond your control have denied you.

That is the story, in a nutshell, of Zulfat Mukarubega, a remarkable businesswoman and educationist whose indomitable spirit and determination propelled her to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles and make a profound impact in her country.

When we arrived at her residence in Kanombe, Nyarugunga sector, Kicukiro District, for a late afternoon interview, the first thing that struck us was her meekness.

With an abundance of trees and beautiful flowers, the 66-year-old businesswoman’s home is a serene and cosy sanctuary that would delight any nature lover.

Due to the ongoing construction works next door, we regrettably could not conduct the interview at Mukarubega’s old yet meticulously maintained house.

However, Mukarubega, the proprietor of the University of Tourism, Technology, and Business Studies (UTB), being a woman full of solutions, made the decision to go to Rebero, where she is currently overseeing the construction of a new campus. This campus is projected to be completed by September, and Mukarubega was hopeful that moving to that location would provide a quieter environment.

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During the interview, one characteristic shone through prominently - perseverance. Despite facing difficult odds, this remarkable woman has demonstrated grace and resilience.

Mukarubega is not someone who sits down when a solution is needed. Her life has revolved around addressing problems and turning them into opportunities, and more often than not, she has succeeded.

Before we set off to Rebero, one of her daughters arrived home and promptly excused herself to perform the fourth prayer of the day, known as Maghrib in Islam.

Once again, spirituality is evident in everything she does, and to complement this, the educationist is a strong and grounded family woman, involving her children in all aspects of her life.

Starting out

Born in 1957 in what was known as Commune Runyinya in the current Nyaruguru District, Southern Province, the odds were stacked against Mukarubega, despite her brilliance in school.

"At the time, it was difficult to go to school, not just because I was a girl, but because there were issues of ethnicity; in class, we would be asked to say if we were Hutu or Tutsi. The conditions were not conducive due to bad leadership at the time,” Mukarubega recalls.

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Born in a catholic family, Mukarubega was sent to Butare after primary school to study midwifery and childcare but while at it, she enlisted to join her elder sisters and become a nun.

Before she could get into the convent, she was sent to Kigali to live with her brother and find a job.

"I was about 20 years old at the time, and that was in 1979. I got a job and started working, and that is also when I got married and converted to Islam. But life was not easy.

"I decided to find something to do to sustain us. That is when I opened a restaurant near some garages in Gikondo, where I worked as an accountant. I used to walk a distance of more than seven kilometres daily, to and from Nyamirambo where we lived,” Makurebega says.

She did not have anything, not even furniture or utensils needed to start a restaurant. She took some from home and borrowed saucepans from her neighbours and friends.

"I had Rwf5, 000 on me. I used it to buy some items, sugar, and bread to start with. I didn’t have any other money and neither did my husband,” she notes.

She used part of the money to pay the porter who helped her carry the items to Gikondo early in the morning, and using firewood, she prepared tea for the mechanics who worked in the area.

"I added spices that Muslims normally use and moved around calling people to come to the restaurant. In reality, it was a shack. Even getting in was pretty difficult.

"They came in numbers. I had about six stools but others decided to take the tea standing. It worked. The first money I made, I went and bought food items to prepare lunch and they showed up again,” Mukarubega recounts.

As they say, when it is working, do not change it. She did it again the next day and things started picking up quickly. A year later, the restaurant expanded. All this time she was still walking to and from home to save.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way

Soon, people noticed that Mukarubega was succeeding in her restaurant business, and more restaurants started opening up in the area, including one in the then-Gikondo Industrial Park. Clients started dwindling.

"I decided to change strategy and open a shop in Nyamirambo, between 1980 and 1981. Why a shop when there were many shops? My plan was to use a strategy that would woo customers to my shop,” Mukarubega says.

It is no surprise that today Mukarubega is in the hospitality space. That is where she saw herself even as a child— she enjoyed welcoming visitors home and taking care of them.

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At her little shop, Mukarubega thrived on making it look neat and organised, complete with a small table with a big bouquet of flowers at the front on the main street in Biryogo.

"People would come to look at the beautiful flowers and they’d end up entering the shop. I would welcome them and they would buy something,” she says.

Soon, the boutique, as they are commonly known, was christened "Kwa Mama Wacu”. Things seemed to be falling into place, so her husband purchased an old pickup truck.

However, the second-hand car was past its best days and would break down all the time, spending most of the time in the garage. Again, in the garages where they would take it to be fixed, she saw an opportunity.

"I noticed that Ugandans and Congolese were doing all the mechanical work while Rwandans spent their time playing ‘Igisoro’. In 1984 I thought of establishing an automobile training and accounting school. It eventually opened in 1985.”

She improvised, using the available resources, hired teachers and the school picked up tremendously.

Back to school

In 1986, the mother-of-two thought to herself "I am educating others but not myself. How will I manage a school without knowledge?”

She approached her elder sisters, the nuns, and they helped her enrol in Lycée Notre Dame de Cîteaux to resume her studies in 1987. She would drop off the children in the nursery section and go to study in secondary.

"It was a huge struggle for me on a daily basis. A woman with two children and responsibilities. From school, I would go to the shop, located in Biryogo, and the driving school in Gakinjiro, and then go home to cook and take care of the children and husband,” Mukarubega says.

When everyone else would go to bed, Mukarubega would fill a basin with cold water, put her feet in, and review her books. Additionally, she made a young friend who assisted her with her studies.

"I would sleep for two hours a night. I did that for two years and I was so exhausted. During that period, I got pregnant with my third child. Soon I developed hypertension. I spent five months in hospital,” she recalls.

Upon return, she had fallen back, other students had done their exams and the school was not looking to help her out of the situation. She joined another school, APE Rugunga, to finish her studies.

It was all too much for her but before she could even pick up where she had stopped, the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi broke out and everything collapsed in one heap.

Before that, Mukarubega’s family had endured relentless attacks, like many families that were persecuted at the time, accused of working with RPF Inkotanyi. Her husband fled home and left her with four children and 16 other dependents.

Throughout the Genocide, the situation really became worse, shops got ransacked, including hers. She was sleeping in what used to be her shop, now without a door, with many others.

Back in business

After the Genocide, a relative came from Burundi to check on them and found Mukarubega. The relative gave her $200. She used half of it to buy a few goods to restock.

"At the time, people were grabbing properties of others, but I thought to myself that I didn’t have to, after all, God had given us another chance to live,” she says.

In 1996, thereabout, Mukarubega decided to approach the Bank of Kigali, which was her bank, and asked for a loan of $3,000 to import clothes from Italy. She had never travelled.

The bank trusted her with the money and she went to the European country and returned with suitcases full of quality clothes and shoes.

She fixed the door and set up shop. Within a month, the items were sold out. She now settled in the apparel business but it didn’t take long. She thought of something else to do.

"In business, you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket,” and so Mukarubega approached her brothers who were in the business of importing goods. She asked how to join them and they gave her the ‘magic formula’.

She got her savings, and interested other traders in giving her advance to import goods for them at a profit. On the first attempt, three people trusted her. In 1997 she set off for Dubai, armed with people’s money and ambition.

In Dubai, UAE, Mukarubega decided to buy a second-hand mini-truck, found a way of sealing it along with the goods in a container, and brought it home to sell. Every time she went, she did the same.

She would kill two birds with one stone, as the adage goes, importing a vehicle and goods at the same time. She repeated the same formula. Her entrepreneurial versatility struck again.

In 1999, Mukarubega abandoned the apparel business and went into furniture, setting up a furniture shop.

"The country was really rebuilding. Having travelled a bit, and seen furniture in hotels and offices, I noticed that there was still a gap in quality furniture in our country,” she recalls.

Mukarubega started importing quality furniture for homes and offices, bid for government contracts to supply, and before she knew it, the furniture business was expanding.

Again, her hospitality and education instincts hit home and in 2000, she thought of opening a hospitality school because that is what she loved.

"Many people told me it was a bad idea, ‘not even the government is investing in hospitality schools’. ‘Do you have more money than the government’?” Mukarubega knew it was a good idea regardless of the discouragement she was getting.

She went for a study tour to Kenya, Utari College in particular, to see how it was done, and later Cape Town and Mauritius. The tour was everything she needed.

"I wanted to see how it is done there. I used to see how visitors are welcomed in other countries and I would think to myself, why can’t we have this kind of hospitality?

"For me, setting up a school to teach hospitality was the best way to do it. Many told me this was something a woman cannot do. They would ask me why I didn’t want to stay in business because I was doing well.”

A calling answered

For Mukarubega, it was a calling she was not going to hesitate to answer. In Cape Town and Mauritius, she met people with the know-how who took her through the key things she needed her to succeed.

She started to buy equipment needed for the school, one at a time, and in 2006, she hired teachers—in a rented building in town, she opened her school. She started with five unenthused students who were even reluctant to pay tuition for their one-and-a-half-year diploma course.

Mukarubega approached her district, Kicukiro, and told the Mayor that she had opened a hospitality school and was looking to offer scholarships to orphaned children.

The district gave her 11 students, who were added to the five, making it 16 but a month later, however, six abandoned the course. The 10 completed the course and were employed by hotels and they turned out impressive.

In 2007, she learned about an international conference that was scheduled to take place in Rwanda. She then approached the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MINICOM) and proposed training hotel workers to ensure that the country had skilled professionals available to serve in hotels by the time of the event.

The idea worked, the Ministry got her 150 hotel staff in Kigali and another 150 in Rubavu. Things moved fast. They were given a crash course in customer care. At the time, customer care was at its lowest.

Mukarubega acted proactively, following up on her trainees even in the hotels where they worked, paying attention to small details, to make sure that they were doing the right thing.

"I went to each and every hotel and asked if the training impacted them, but the feedback I got was that the lower staff were now well trained and doing their work, but the managers and supervisors were making their work difficult and conducted themselves unprofessionally.

"I thought we needed a degree course to train professional managers, and on the first attempt, we managed to enlist 400 candidates for the programme,” Mukarubega explains.

Though it may seem effortless, her journey has been filled with countless challenges, with numerous individuals attempting to dissuade her along the way. Nevertheless, she persisted.

Mukarubega, a member of the ruling party, the Rwanda Patriotic Front, attributes her resilience to those who fought to liberate the country from scratch.

At certain points, she would feel the urge to give up, but her determination lies in contributing to the rebuilding and transformation journey of Rwanda.

To date, Mukarubega believes her success in business is founded on the principles of a country and leadership that gives people opportunities and repays hard work.

Without the support of institutions, she wouldn’t be where she is today because for every idea she thought of, the government supported it and it delivered results.

Mukarubega is thankful to President Kagame for his visionary leadership that has put Rwanda on the map and offered citizens opportunities.

Today, her university, UTB, sends tourism and hospitality students for paid internships in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, through knowledge transfer agreements.

The initiative, which is monitored through Rwandan embassies, began slightly before the Covid-19 pandemic, has seen 89 Rwandans sent to work in the two Middle Eastern countries and another group set to go soon.

"We follow up on them, we do Zoom meetings, and we have WhatsApp groups where we chat. The government offers tickets. Even though they are interns, they are paid.

"I want to particularly thank President Kagame for opening doors for us in a dignified manner,” Mukarubega says.

The interns spend six months to one year doing internships in dignified jobs. Mukarubega says those who go turn out to be the best and they are hired.

"All of our students who went for internships were retained. Another batch is going in October,” Mukarubega says.

"I want to encourage women and girls to grab the opportunity our government gave us and use it. Let us not waste this chance. We have the backing of the country, nothing should hold us back,” she says.