Nurturing the next crop of innovative entrepreneurs
Uganda is the land of entrepreneurs, or is it? We have consistently heard this but struggle for corresponding evidence on how this entrepreneurship is translating into dignified and fulfilling jobs for young people and contributing to social economic transformation.
This is more important as over 700,000 young people reach working age every year and only 75,000 jobs are created per year. An average of one million young people are expected to reach working age between 2030 and 2040.
The question is: Does entrepreneurship fuel economic growth, inspire job creation especially as the future of work changes?
Yes, entrepreneurs create businesses and new businesses create jobs, strengthen market competition and increase productivity. This, however, is far from reality for the case of Uganda.
Over the last three years, The Innovation Village embarked on a journey to understand why. Here is the story of a typical Ugandan entrepreneur.
Namaganda like a million other young entrepreneurs across the world is passionate about her idea. She has read all the stories of zero to a billion and somehow believes her idea is much better than all of those entrepreneurs but the world just hasn’t discovered her.
She goes on to build up social pages on Facebook and Twitter with her startup name, give herself a title maybe something like CEO and Founder and starts promoting her business.
Namaganda will attend one or two trainings on how to start and grow her business, be motivated by all the speeches of people who will tell her it’s possible and how many times someone failed before they made a light bulb.
Luck, in some cases, will smile on her and she will get an award, win a grant and get going.
Three years later, Namaganda will still be struggling. She will probably be doing a completely new business. She will tell you that she couldn’t afford to pay taxes, and she was not able to access credit to finance her business. If she is lucky she will have ended up as an Innovation Manager in a company that admired her creativity abandoning her zero to a billion dream.
Mike, a young American, on the other hand, comes up with an exciting idea. He will sign up for an accelerator programme that will allow him to access seed capital of $100,000, mentors who have walked the path he is walking many times over, investors who are hungry to have a piece of the future Mike represents, a policy environment focused on ensuring there are over 100 Mikes everyday coming up and a private sector that is aware that their best shot at the future is by establishing how to work with the next Mike. He will go on to raise additional rounds of capital before he exits his big idea to become an investor himself.
Groom innovators
For every Ugandan entrepreneur who has failed, there is an entrepreneur out there doing the same who is succeeding because of the environment they are in. The Innovation Village stands in the deep gulley, where young businesses and ideas from Ugandan innovators previously used to fall and meet their imminent death.
The start-up hub encourages other entrepreneurs to design, prototype, test, scale and launch imaginative and enterprising ideas together.
The hub links entrepreneurs to an early stage financing through an Angel Network and an early stage investment fund. Alternative capital channels have also been unlocked through large industry partnerships, access to the marketplace for their solutions, business development support to understand if they have a good business idea and a community of like minds going through similar experience and can become coworkers. This is in addition to peer learning.
The innovation hub is branching out to Gulu, Jinja and Mbarara while creating a 5,000 sqm Creative Makerspace to unlock the potential of Uganda’s creative industry. Technology is at the forefront of the future of work, offering a gateway to solve our most pressing challenges.
In 2019, Innovation Hub scooped two awards at the Top 100 Mid-sized Companies Award Gala as the leading Ugandan start-up hub and The Most Innovative Company of 2019. These awards are the journey and not the goal.
As we embark on the next decade, we are focused on market making for entrepreneurs to build a platform to ensure they are solving challenges at scale. We hope to create a new future of work for 300,000 young people especially young women leveraging the technology advantage.
The author is the founder Innovation Village.
