A month after uploading BunnyNest Tracker to Apple’s App Store, Audrey Chanakira opened its dashboard expecting little more than confirmation that her brother had downloaded it.
Instead, she found strangers.
The rabbit farming app she had built in three days was attracting users in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
“I saw people downloading the application,” she recalls. “I wondered where the downloads were coming from.”
BunnyNest Tracker was never intended to become a product. Her brother had asked her to recreate a printable PDF he had found online to help him keep track of breeding schedules and rabbit stock.
Chanakira, a software engineer, thought software would do the job better. So she built him an iOS application in three days, uploaded it to Apple’s App Store so he could download it while he was abroad, and moved on.
The app, created for a single rabbit farmer, quietly found users around the world.
That unexpected success came to define Chanakira’s career. “Most people like hype,” she says. “But for me, it’s really laying a foundation and living a legacy that matters.”
Long before software became her calling, Chanakira’s first love was football.
Growing up in Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, as one of three children, she says she was a quiet child who was often bullied because she rarely spoke. Football became an escape. She played for her school’s girls’ football team throughout school, and the confidence she gained on the pitch gradually replaced the shyness that had defined much of her childhood.
“I gained popularity as I played football,” she says. “That boosted my confidence.”
Computers entered her life not through a classroom but through play. On her uncle’s computer, she spent hours playing FIFA. Before long, she found herself exploring Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Paint, clicking through menus to understand what they could do.
By the time she graduated from Christ Ministries High School in Belvedere, Harare, in 2012, studying Information Technology at Harare Polytechnic, one of Zimbabwe’s oldest technical colleges, felt like the natural next step.
A move that changed everything
After completing her diploma in 2013, Chanakira’s father secured a four-year work contract in Namibia and encouraged her to continue her education there. With Zimbabwe grappling with economic challenges at the time, the decision felt obvious.
In 2014, she enrolled at the University of Namibia, a public university in Windhoek, the country’s capital, to study information technology.
The university introduced her to what would become her biggest academic challenge: programming.
Chanakira had convinced herself that programming was one of those subjects people were either naturally good at or not cut out for.
“Programming was like a beast to me,” she says. “I could not just get it.”
Eventually, she realised the problem was not programming but her mindset. Rather than avoiding the subject, she spent extra hours studying, watched YouTube tutorials, built small projects and kept practising until the concepts began to click.
“I changed my mindset,” she says. “I was like, ‘No, this subject does not have life. I will learn and understand. I think that was one of the most important things that I’ve ever done that still carries me till today.”
Outside the classroom, Chanakira immersed herself in Namibia’s growing tech ecosystem. She attended almost every technology event she could find, eager to meet other builders, learn from them, and test her own abilities.
“I would always participate in tech events and hackathons,” she says. “But I wouldn’t win, really.”
Still, she kept showing up.
That persistence paid off in 2017, during her third year at university, when she and four other students entered Namibia’s third Open & Big Data Innovation Hackathon. The team built a prototype for a mobile application that helped parents find nearby schools with available places, addressing one of the country’s common school admission challenges.
The prototype won the hackathon and earned the team a meeting with Namibia’s Ministry of Education, which expressed interest in developing the idea further.
“It never really went far because sometimes when you have an idea that is like five years ahead, people don’t really take you seriously,” she says.
Looking back, Chanakira believes her lack of confidence also prevented the idea from going further.
“I wasn’t really confident enough in my ability to produce solutions that make sense,” she says. “I could have started with one school. You never know, it could have been somewhere.”
The victory also earned her an internship at Green Enterprise Solutions, a Namibian Information and Communication Technology (ICT) company that develops enterprise software and digital products. She joined the company in September 2017 and spent the next seven years growing from a mobile developer into a technical leader.
Building technology that matters
Green Enterprise gave Chanakira more than her first job. It gave her the freedom to explore.
When her supervisor asked whether she wanted to specialise in Android or iOS development, she didn’t hesitate.
“I liked iPhones,” she says with a laugh. “It was the chance I had been waiting for.”
Over the next few years, she led Green’s iOS team before taking charge of its augmented and virtual reality initiatives in 2021.
“I was very curious about new things and how we could use them to improve our services,” she says.
One project, in particular, shifted her perspective. Working on an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, software that helps organisations manage core business operations, for Namibia’s state-owned oil company, NAMCOR, showed her how software powers critical national infrastructure. Watching oil tankers arrive as digital systems tracked inventories gave her a new appreciation for technology’s scale.
“It was eye-opening,” she says. “Technology is everywhere. It serves different purposes.”
Then came 2020.
Like millions around the world, Chanakira watched businesses struggle under COVID-19 restrictions. Rather than wait for normalcy to return, her team asked a different question: What problem could they solve?
The answer was Tap-a-Meal, a food ordering application that connected restaurants with customers during lockdown.
As restaurants began receiving orders again, Chanakira saw something much bigger unfolding. Drivers found work, restaurants found customers again, and families could still order meals without leaving their homes.
“That really birthed my philosophy,” she says. “I want to create technology that makes a difference in society.”
After seven years at Green Enterprise Solutions, Chanakira left the company in 2024, closing the chapter that had shaped much of her early career.
Building more than software
As Chanakira’s career grew, she realised that making an impact meant more than building software. It also meant investing in the people and communities who would create the next generation of solutions.
That conviction led her to co-found the Zim Developers Community in 2021.
She had been searching for a space where Zimbabwean developers could exchange ideas, collaborate, and discuss solutions to local challenges. Instead, she found online groups dominated by memes and lighthearted banter.
“I didn’t find that useful,” she says. “I wanted a community of serious people who are passionate about their country and are willing to provide solutions.”
So she and a fellow developer, George Chakama, built one.
What began as a small network has grown into a thriving community of students, software engineers, startup founders, and technology enthusiasts who collaborate, share opportunities, and learn from one another. Through Telegram discussions and its flagship event, Sibanye, the community has become a meeting point for people using technology to solve Zimbabwe’s challenges.
Balancing personal projects with running the community can be overwhelming, Chanakira admits. But the experience has also taught her lessons that extend far beyond software engineering.
“It has taught me to be a good listener,” she says. “People have different personalities, different opinions, and different communication styles.”
Listening, she says, is one of the most overlooked skills in technology. “Sometimes we like to build solutions because we think they’re cool,” she says. “But no one uses them because we didn’t ask the right people if they actually needed them.”
The philosophy also shapes how she mentors younger developers.
“I’m always open to people who come to me who need guidance,” she says.
Helping others navigate challenges she once faced has made her a better leader. It has taught her patience, strengthened her emotional intelligence, and helped her work with people whose perspectives differ from her own.
Building for home
Today, Chanakira is thinking beyond the products she can build to the future she hopes to help shape.
As artificial intelligence transforms industries around the world, she has become an advocate for Edge AI, which enables AI to work offline or with limited connectivity, and locally owned data, arguing that Africa must build, not just adopt, AI technologies.
“Some of the solutions that matter most are in places where there is no network,” she says. “Edge AI makes sense to me because it allows technology to solve real problems without necessarily needing an Internet connection.”
She is equally passionate about ensuring Africa owns the data that powers those systems.
“We have the expertise. We have the talent,” she says. “We just need people who are willing to get their hands dirty and build practical solutions for their countries.”
Given unlimited resources, Chanakira says she would modernise Zimbabwe’s public digital infrastructure. She recalls seeing some government initiatives relying on Gmail accounts and says she’d rather build an integrated ecosystem of government systems, spanning ministries from Home Affairs to Health, that citizens can depend on.
“I would do it for free,” she says. “I’m a patriotic Zimbabwean.”
That sense of purpose deepened in 2024 when Chanakira joined the 13th cohort of the Afrika KOMMT fellowship, a one-year leadership programme that placed her at SAP, a German multinational enterprise software company. Living in Germany changed more than her understanding of enterprise software. It also made her realise how little of Zimbabwe she had explored.
“When I went to Germany, I realised that I haven’t traveled much in my own country,” she says. “Germany really inspired me to understand my own country, understand the demographics.”
After returning to Zimbabwe, she resisted the urge to jump straight into another full-time role. Instead, she travelled across the country, meeting people and learning about communities she had never truly known despite growing up there.
“If I’m going to produce solutions for my country,” she says, “I need to understand my people first.”
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