The Sunday News
Thembinkosi Khumalo, Sunday Life Reporter
BULAWAYO-based technical entrepreneur, Thamsanqa Bhala has developed a website application that will work as a portal for primary and secondary school pupils.
The technical entrepreneur, Bhala said his main focus was to develop a free web application in the education sector.
“The web app is called connectschs and it is a free primary and high school portal. Connectschs allows Zimbabwean school bursars to update school fees payments made by parents and also keep track of invoice payments.
The website also allows parents or guardians to login, in order to view the school fees payments, they have made,” said Bhala.
He said most universities have portal systems that allow parents and students to view payments online, but there was no such platform for primary and high schools.
Bhala said the motivation behind creating the web app was to make it easy for schools to update pupils’ school fees payments so that parents even those outside the country can have access to the information for free.
He added: “I started creating websites and applications in 2018. One of my other works is an application called Rake Search that helps users to search and post for products and services within their locations.”
He said since the website was going to be used also by primary pupils, he had to make sure that the website was really not difficult to use.
“The same applies to the elderly who are not well versed with the internet, they should also be able to use it.
Primary and Secondary schools across Zimbabwe can now create school admin accounts for free by visiting www.connectschs.com.
“The tutorial on how to use Connectschs is available on the website as well.’’ Bhala pointed out.
Bhala emphasised that the key users of the website are school bursars who will be able to capture and update school fees payment records for pupils.
He said this will allow parents to be able to login from anywhere and view how much they have paid as well as to check their balances.
“They can visit the website and create accounts for free. The interesting thing is that, there is no subscription fee to be paid to access the application.
“Since this is an app I have just recently finished creating, no schools have used it but I have dropped the tutorials at a couple of schools around Bulawayo and most of them are promising to start using the app early next year since for now, schools are about to be closed,’’ the technocrat added.
