Zimbabwean billionaire Strive Masiyiwa receives honorary degree from Princeton University at its 2026 commencement

Strive Masiyiwa received an honorary degree from Princeton University on Tuesday, May 26, one of six honorees recognized at the Ivy League institution's 279th Commencement ceremony, joining a list that included a former CIA director, a Nobel laureate and a jazz legend.

Princeton awarded honorary degrees to William J. Burns, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency; Steven Chu, pioneering physicist, Nobel laureate and former US Secretary of Energy; Caryl Emerson, Princeton's own A. Watson Armour III University Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages; Herbie Hancock, jazz innovator and 14-time Grammy Award winner; Jaynee LaVecchia, the longest-serving female justice on the New Jersey Supreme Court; and Masiyiwa.

The recognition from one of the world's most selective universities places the Zimbabwean billionaire in rare company. Princeton's honorary degrees are awarded to figures who, in the university's own standard, exemplify its highest ideals.

Princeton's citation for Masiyiwa emphasized his philanthropic legacy alongside his business achievements. Through the Higherlife Foundation and Delta Philanthropies, he and his wife Tsitsi Masiyiwa have funded more than 400,000 scholarships for orphaned, vulnerable and gifted young Africans since 1996, covering support from early childhood through doctoral studies. The programs span education, health, rural transformation and sustainable livelihoods.

In 2025, the couple received the David Rockefeller Bridging Leadership Award for their philanthropic work. They are early signatories of the Giving Pledge, the initiative co-founded by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett that asks billionaires to commit the majority of their wealth to philanthropy.

Masiyiwa currently serves on the boards of Netflix and the National Geographic Society and on the advisory boards of Stanford University and Bank of America. He is a trustee of the Gates Foundation and an international honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He previously sat on the boards of The Rockefeller Foundation and Unilever.

The Princeton honor arrives in one of the most active periods of Masiyiwa's career. His Cassava Technologies has launched Africa's first NVIDIA-powered AI factory in South Africa and is expanding GPU infrastructure across Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt and Morocco. The AISCA Foundation, backed by Cassava and headquartered in Kigali, launched this week with targets to reach one million African AI workers through compute grants and skills training.

Masiyiwa, 65, founded Econet Global in Zimbabwe in the early 1990s after a seven-year legal battle against the government for a mobile phone operating license, a fight he won in the Supreme Court. He built it into a pan-African technology and telecommunications group that today spans telecoms, fintech, satellite services, cloud and AI infrastructure.