The founder of The Future of Hope Foundation, she has promoted mushroom cultivation as a sustainable source of food and income in impoverished regions of the world.
[2] She lived with her grandmother and her brother, but she endured abuse at the hands of family members and had to leave school at age nine to work full-time, "digging in people’s fields all to get a small bowl of maize meal".
[2] When she was ten, one of her mother's sisters suggested marriage to a man thirty years her senior, but Govera refused, afraid to leave her grandmother and her younger brother.
[2] In 1998 at age eleven, with the help of a woman from the local United Methodist Church, she enrolled in a week-long program at Africa University in Mutare, Zimbabwe, financed by Gunter Pauli[3] and the ZERI Foundation,[4] There she learn how to colonise oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus) using corn stalk waste products.
[2] After working in the university's lab between the ages of 12 and 16 years, she was not only able to feed her own family, she was able to teach other orphans to raise mushrooms successfully.