A retired executive profits most from empowering others

By Jason Keyser

More than a decade ago, as Zimbabwe was struggling to recover from an economic meltdown, Stella Dongo faced perhaps her biggest challenge in a life full of them. The furniture company where she was CEO was forced to drastically downsize, and it fell to her to help decide whom to let go from a dedicated workforce that included dear friends. Having grown up poor herself, she knew exactly what was at stake. “You would know for sure that this person that you were letting go was going to be in the streets and starving, basically,” she says. “That I found very, very difficult to comprehend and to live with myself.”

Like other business leaders at that time of turmoil, she was out of options. In the 2000s, hyper-inflation had bankrupted the government, left the currency nearly worthless, and plunged 8 in 10 people into destitution. The crisis essentially wiped out the entire formal economy, destroying farms, factories, and companies.

Even as the economy began to stabilize slightly at the end of the decade, Dongo knew there was nothing left for the masses of unemployed people to return to. “I was very aware of how important it was for people to find ways of making a living and to fend for themselves outside of formal employment,” she says.

So in 2009, Dongo and other members of the Rotary Club of Highlands launched the Community Empowerment Project with a $330,000 grant from The Rotary Foundation. Focusing on youth and women, the program taught computer and business skills in communities near the capital, Harare. Survivors of Zimbabwe’s economic crisis, it turned out, were still hard at work, eking out a subsistence living in the informal economy through everything from cross-border trading and garment making to animal husbandry and handicrafts.

The idea was to teach people how to develop these “backyard businesses into something more substantial,” says Dongo. “Most of them tended not to understand if their business was growing, making money, or if they were actually losing money. We taught them the basics of identifying costs, the concept of profit, issues like pricing and marketing.”

Starting in 2014, the club and its international project partners in the Rotary Club of Denver Mile High, Colorado, received global grants to provide advanced training and to expand their efforts to more communities. By 2015, the initiative had trained more than 6,000 women and young people.

That same year, Rotary introduced its People of Action Honors program. The inaugural honorees were celebrated as Global Women of Action, and Dongo was recognized alongside five other Rotarians from Australia, Bangladesh, Germany, and the United States. They were featured at Rotary Day at the United Nations, where they addressed attendees at the organization’s headquarters in New York City. For the business executive, the experience opened new doors while crowning her remarkable rise from a childhood in the Black township of Mufakose in a then-segregated, British-ruled Rhodesia.

“I don’t even know where to begin,” Dongo says. “It was a very difficult childhood.” Dongo’s mom died when she was 8, leaving her father striving as a single parent to raise and provide for his six children. But it was a close-knit family, one characterized by a hunger for knowledge and a better life. “Much as we were struggling,” Dongo recalls, “much as we had very little, much as there was not much hope, we had this strong desire for knowledge and for education. That desire never died in me.”

Amid hardships, Dongo’s formal education was full of stops and starts. But she always had a book in her hands, anything left by siblings, friends, or visitors. And even if she couldn’t be in class, she’d present herself for exams — and pass them.

Seeing few opportunities after high school, Dongo married early, started a family, and worked as a home caregiver for older adults. Later, she earned a bachelor’s in commerce from the University of South Africa through correspondence classes and worked as a retail salesperson. Then came Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980. “That was a huge thing,” she says. “A lot of opportunities started to open up for Black people.”

Others recognized her leadership skill, and throughout the 1980s and ’90s Dongo climbed the management ranks at a retail clothing company during a golden period of strong economic growth. In the mid-’90s, a colleague invited her to join Rotary, where, she says, she initially felt “a bit lost” among members who all seemed to be leading big projects. But she soon found her footing, taking leadership roles and, in 2005, becoming president of the Highlands club.

By then the economy was unraveling, and workers were fleeing the country. With the Community Empowerment Project, Dongo hoped to stem this crippling flight of workers; most of all, she wanted to help people like the employees she once had to let go. Years later, she was relieved to reconnect with and help some of those former employees who, she says, “somehow found a way out and managed to survive the worst of that period.”

Through its final session, in 2023, the Community Empowerment Project trained about 10,000 people, Dongo estimates. It also shifted mindsets, she says, giving trainees the confidence to know they could help themselves. Dongo, meanwhile, became the first woman to serve as governor of her Rotary district. She led the board of World Vision Zimbabwe, the child- and family-focused nongovernmental organization, and she served as District 9210’s Rotary Foundation chair, providing leadership on scores of global grant-supported projects.

Today, her Rotary club and about two dozen others in Zimbabwe continue to be a lifeline, providing essential services that the government is unable to maintain in areas such as clean water, sanitation, disease prevention, and basic education. In one project that’s particularly close to her heart, Dongo’s club is building a school in a remote area, where she takes delight in meeting the young children, some barefoot but all full of life and energy and eager to sing with their Rotary visitors.

And in their bright, joyful faces, Dongo says, she sees herself as a little girl, and it fills her with hope.

This story originally appeared in the June 2025 issue of Rotary magazine.

related stories

Using technology as a force for good: Beth Simone Noveck

A pioneer in Black horror fiction: Tananarive Due

Finding family in France: Athena Trentin