From Education Influencer to the UN: Vee Kativhu takes Empowered By Vee on the road.

If you haven’t heard of Vee Kativhu yet, be ready to be impressed. At 24 years old she has graduated from Oxford University and Harvard, holds a MSc in International Education Policy, and is a Young Leader of the Sustainable Development Goals at the United Nations where she is championing goal 4, Quality Education. Not bad for a working class girl who moved to the UK from Zimbabwe aged 7, unable to speak a word of English.

And she’s not one to gatekeep, because she uses everything she has learnt to run Empowered By Vee - an academic empowerment platform on a mission to bridge the gap between academic ability and self-belief. The platform aims to help make higher education more accessible for students who feel unsupported or underrepresented, by addressing issues such as imposter-syndrome, rejection and productivity through their dynamic skill-based empowerment workshops. It started as a simple YouTube channel, and now it is bigger than Vee ever could have imagined.

Since 2018, Empowered By Vee has grown to support over 17,000 students online, with over 1,250 having attended their staple Annual Academic Empowerment Conference. They describe their mission for 2023 as working towards reaching 5,000 students in person to deliver these empowerment workshops as they begin the journey of trying to get Empowerment Workshop Skills onto school curriculums. 

And they’re well on their way to that with EBV The School Tour! Sponsored by the Black Fund. For a week in February 2023, Vee and her team of volunteers embarked on a tour around schools in England, providing a series of interactive and practical workshops designed for Sixth-Form students applying to university. They went to Birmingham, Buckinghamshire, London, and Surrey.

With over 600 students in attendance, the week was a huge success with 78% of students leaving the sessions feeling ‘empowered and ready to tackle the next stages of their goals, education or respective applications’ - which is exactly what we want to hear.

Follow Vee and EBV to keep up with the work she is doing towards making quality education accessible for all. Follow The Black Fund to stay up to date with the important work they’re doing to tackle social inequality.