Musharu Simbarashe

Musharu Simbarashe designed and developed a software package called School Administration Software. The prime objective was to provide for an efficient and effective way of systematically recording data in schools about a student, student payments, student invoices. Later on, the package extended into school ID production and student registration. Other new facets like integrating with banks for electronic data interchange were included.

Traditionally, schools wrote volumes of books manually, trying to record information about student, be it marks or payments made. With time these books would fill up space in the offices. Searching for information stretching back to 2, 3 and 5 years back and so on was not only cumbersome, but often led to dead ends. Meanwhile, some schools which had computers often used a spreadsheet. However, this approach again has its own challenges ranging from no room for concurrent access right up to inability to provide room for complex reporting in multiple dimensions. Therefore, I thought of a relational database, and distributed application for querying the database. My first deployment was at Mucheke High School in Masvingo.

The project did not take off very well due several reasons including resistance to change, and skills challenge of the client domain. I moved on to make second deployment at Victoria High school in Masvingo around 2006. This time the project worked out very well. It received tremendous input from both the school management up to school development committee. Up to this day, implementation at Victoria High School is a cut above the rest. The project spread to Masvingo Christian High School. When I moved to Chinhoyi, it was highly adopted by Chaedza Primary School, Chikonohono Primary School, Chinhoyi High School, Mushumbi High School, Chikangwe High School, right up to Kwekwe High School. To this day School adminstration software is a package which is continuing to gain ground into school [1]