Somewhere in Zimbabwe tonight, a girl is closing a book before bed, unaware that the story she just read may quietly decide something no career fair or classroom ever could: whether she grows up believing that designing a bridge, purifying a city's water, or engineering its future is something people who look like her actually do. She won't remember the title in ten years. But if the story did its job, she'll remember the feeling — that a girl in the pages solved problems, built things, and mattered. That feeling has a name in Rudo Makaya's world. She calls it belief, and she has spent her career trying to build it as deliberately as she builds bridges.
Makaya is an award-winning Zimbabwean civil and water engineer, recognised for her work on sustainable infrastructure and water, sanitation and hygiene (Wash) projects across southern Africa , the kind of career most children never see modelled by someone who looks like them, let alone imagine for themselves. That gap is what led her to write Pillars of Possibility: A Civil Engineering Storybook, a children's book that introduces engineering not through blueprints and technical language, but through the same medium that shapes every child's earliest sense of who they can become: story. Her timing is deliberate. As Africa marked Pan-African Women's Day last Friday — a day rooted in honouring the women who refused to accept the limits set for them— Makaya's answer to the continent's stalled progress on women in STEM is disarmingly simple: stop waiting until girls choose their exam subjects to inspire them, and start years earlier, in the pages of the books they read as children. In that regard,Makaya says she wrote the book to inspire young girls to take up engineering as a career.
"I wanted to show that with determination and teamwork, any girl can pick up the tools of engineering and build a future she believes in," she stated when asked about the inspiration behind her latest book project.
Long before children choose examination subjects or sit through career guidance sessions, they have already begun forming ideas about who they can become ,shaped by the books they read, the people they admire, and the lives they see reflected around them.
Career guidance, in other words, does not begin in a classroom. It begins in childhood, often hidden within the pages of a book. That is the premise Pillars of Possibility is built on: before children choose careers, they must first discover them, and before they can discover them, they must believe those careers are within reach.
An award-winning recipient of the Zimbabwe Institution of Engineers' Dr T M Stevenson Rising Star Award, Makaya has built her professional reputation on work that improves access to essential services while demonstrating how engineering can strengthen communities. But her time in the field revealed a challenge no infrastructure project could fix on its own: many children, particularly girls, never get the chance to see engineering as a career that belongs to them. Rather than accept that, she chose to write into it.
Across Africa, engineering remains one of the professions where women continue to be underrepresented, even as the continent's Agenda 2063 ambitions depend on a growing pipeline of engineers to deliver the infrastructure and innovation it calls for. Much of the continent's response to that gap ,scholarships, university enrolment drives, workplace inclusion policies — arrives after children's career aspirations have already taken shape. Those aspirations are formed earlier, and shaped by more than schools and parents: they're shaped by the stories children encounter first.
A story can introduce a child to engineering years before a careers adviser ever explains what a civil engineer does. It can show that designing a bridge is not simply about steel and concrete, but about connecting communities , that building a water system is about protecting public health , that infrastructure, at its core, is deeply human. That is what Pillars of Possibility sets out to do: present engineering through curiosity, creativity and service, and let children see engineers not as distant figures who build things, but as problem-solvers whose work touches every part of daily life.
In many ways, the book reflects Makaya's broader contribution to her profession. Beyond designing infrastructure, she is helping to build something just as essential: belief. Its reach extends past introducing children to a career : it challenges the idea that career guidance belongs only in secondary schools, and reminds us that aspiration often begins earlier, in a library or a living room, the moment a child discovers a character who looks like them doing something they had never imagined possible.
Makaya added that “the characters in her book demonstrated that with determination and teamwork, anyone could overcome challenges and make a difference in their communities."
That lesson feels especially fitting in the days around Pan-African Women's Day. The women the continent celebrates did not become leaders by accident , they were encouraged, inspired, and given room to dream beyond what their time expected of them. Their legacy asks the same of us, for today's girls.
If Africa wants more women designing its bridges, managing its water systems, and leading its infrastructure projects, the work has to start long before university. It has to start with belief.
Africa's next award-winning engineer may not first encounter the profession in a laboratory or a lecture theatre. She may discover it in the pages of a story that quietly tells her she belongs. Because the hardest bridge to build is not made of steel or concrete. It is belief.
Fungayi Antony Sox is team leader and managing editor at TisuMazwi, a communications-driven social enterprise helping individuals and organisations shape, manage and distribute their stories. He writes at the intersection of publishing, digital media and African narrative transformation. A YALI alumnus and award-winning communications consultant, he has worked with over 300 authors, creatives and institutions across Zimbabwe and Africa. Contact: +263 776 030 949 / fungayisox@gmail.com