MGE Alum Serves as Member of Zambian Parliament

Twenty years ago, Brian Mushimba left behind a life of poverty in Zambia to earn his engineering degree at the University of Arizona. Now he serves as the minister of higher education for his home country.

Brian Mushimba was 14 years old before he saw a television or stayed in a house with a flush toilet. He and his 15 siblings grew up in a three-room house in Kankoyo, an impoverished, heavily polluted township in Zambia’s Copperbelt Province. His parents had only basic educations, so by the time Mushimba was a teenager, he was preparing to drop out of school and get a job in the copper mines, like his father.

Everything changed when he temporarily moved to a nearby, wealthier area of the district, to help a cousin of his with household chores. For the first time Mushimba saw glimpses of a different life. He asked his cousin what he would need to do to live like her someday. Her answer: “Get an education.”

A 21-year-old Mushimba packed one shirt, one pair of pants and a pair of shoes and got on a plane for the first time ever to fly to Tucson, Arizona, where he would go on to earn his bachelor’s degree in MGE. Tucson held many more firsts for the ambitious young man, including buying his first car and celebrating the UA winning the 1997 NCAA championship. He also fell in love, married and saw the birth of his son just before graduating.

“I look back at life at the UA from 1996 to 2000 as probably the best, and the turning point in a young man’s life, for an incredible future and the life that I’ve lived ever since,” he said. “The time was just mind-blowingly exciting. The UA and Tucson did not disappoint. They gave me the opportunity to discover myself."

After working in industry for many years and beginning a PhD in environmental engineering at the University of Zambia, Mushimba decided wanted to give back to his country in a new way, as an elected member of parliament, the equivalent to a U.S. senator. He was elected in 2016 and, in 2019 -- just after finishing his PhD -- he was named the country's minister of higher education.

He is now in charge of ensuring the accessibility, affordability and internationally competitive quality of education for all Zambians. One of his first acts was to create the Mushimba Academic Scholarship for vulnerable youth, in hopes of providing today’s students with some of the same opportunities he had.