BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM
This article is part of The Optimist Daily’s Local Changemakers 2026 series, spotlighting changemakers 30 and under.
In March 2020, COVID lockdowns shuttered schools around the world, including at Tongogara Refugee Camp in Zimbabwe, where Prince Bashangezi was completing his A-Level studies. The camp sits near the Mozambique border, home to more than 17,000 people displaced by conflict across central and eastern Africa. Formal schooling stopped. Prince and a group of fellow A-Level students at USAP Community School, a school serving refugee youth in the camp, decided not to wait for it to resume.
They founded TWEENS: Together We Educationally Empower Non-privileged Students. The model was built around what they had: each other.
Teaching from inside the camp
TWEENS began as a service learning project, with refugee students tutoring younger students in the same camp. The premise was direct. These were students who understood exactly what it meant to study without resources, without stability, often without continuous access to teachers, and in many cases without families to support them. They knew the particular difficulty of trying to build a future from inside a displaced population. So they taught each other.
The program was supported by Education Matters Africa, a Zimbabwe-based nonprofit, and launched at a moment when any alternative to organized education was better than none. What began during a global lockdown became something that outlasted it.
Prince was also a Waterford Kamhlaba UWC of Southern Africa alumnus, a school known for selecting students across conflict zones and economic hardship who show unusual potential and commitment. That network eventually connected him to the Global Student Haven Initiative at Pomona College in California, where he now studies computer science and economics.
Marianne Langridge, who nominated Prince for this series, wrote that he “has turned his personal tragedy of losing his family during war into loving service for others.” That framing, loss converted into something that benefits others, runs through how Prince has talked about his work and what TWEENS is for. Langridge described his commitment as rooted in wanting students in refugee camps to “gain access to education so they can have hope for a better future.”
Why peer tutoring works here
There is something specific about a peer model in a refugee context that a standard school or aid program can’t replicate. The tutors in TWEENS are not professionals, not volunteers flying in from outside, not people working from a comfortable distance. They are students who live where the students they’re teaching live. They went through the same disruptions. Their credibility comes from proximity, not credentials.
This is similar in structure to the peer-learning model that makes other youth-run programs effective, but in a refugee camp the stakes of educational continuity are different. A child who falls significantly behind in a displacement context faces a compounding disadvantage. Keeping any educational thread alive, even an informal one built by A-Level students during a lockdown, matters more than it might in a setting with backup resources. TWEENS was built on that understanding.
From Tongogara to Pomona
Prince arrived at Pomona College through the Global Student Haven Initiative, which supports students from refugee and displaced communities. He is studying computer science and economics, a combination that maps directly to the problems TWEENS is trying to solve: how technology and resource allocation interact to either expand or cut off access to education.
Pomona profiled him in 2024 as part of a piece on Global Haven students finding opportunity in higher education. A fundraising campaign on GlobalGiving continues to support TWEENS’ operations, keeping the peer tutoring program funded as he completes his degree.
What Prince Bashangezi and his fellow students built during a lockdown in a refugee camp, with nothing but time and knowledge and the willingness to share both, is still running more than five years later. TWEENS now offers an A-level program, a girls’ book club, and ongoing homework support alongside its original peer tutoring. To support TWEENS, visit their GlobalGiving fundraising page.
