Tererai Trent

Tererai Trent (born c. 1965) is a Zimbabwean-American woman whose unlikely educational success has brought her international fame.

Background and career Trent was born in the village of Zvipani in Karoi District, Mashonaland West Province. She was not allowed to go to her local school, Matau Primary School, as a child due to poverty as well as being female, although her brother Tinashe, an indifferent student, was given the opportunity to attend. She later recalled the men in the village including her father "pointing to the boys in the village and saying 'These are the breadwinners of tomorrow. We need to educate them. We need to send them to school. The girls will get married.'" She taught herself to read and write from her brother's books, and eventually started doing her brother's homework. Trent said she wanted to go to America and get a bachelor's degree, a master's, and eventually a PhD. Three years later, she earned a bachelor's degree in agricultural education.

Her life story was featured in the 2009 book Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, and in an excerpt of that book published by The New York Times Magazine. In 2013, she received her master's degree in Public Health (Epidemiology) from the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. The school was completed in 2014. In 2015, Trent published a children's book about her own life, called The Girl who Buried her Dreams in a Can, illustrated by Jan Spivey Gilchrist. Her 2017 self-help book, The Awakened Woman: Remembering & Igniting Our Sacred Dreams, with a foreword by Oprah Winfrey, was named the Outstanding Literary Work, Instructional at the 49th NAACP Image Awards. She has been an adjunct professor in Monitoring & Evaluation in Global Health at Drexel University since 2013.