A Month of Good Rooms

Every year, more than 240,000 graduates leave Uganda's higher institutions of learning, and far too many of them meet the job market for the first time on the day they need it most. AniScholar Career Hub decided the problem starts much earlier, back when a secondary school learner picks subjects with almost no sense of where they lead. In a new article, co-founder Dr Olivia Aketch writes about turning that conviction into an enterprise.

August brought a run of partner conversations, some at the hive and some in rooms across Kampala. We joined the Mastercard Foundation Uganda Partner Convening on Workforce Development, where Brian Tomusange and Allen Arinaitwe shared what we are learning from building Uganda's first dedicated EdTech accelerator. We hosted the Enabel team for an introductory session on the Africa-Europe Digital Innovation Bridge 2.0, a European Union-funded programme on digital and green entrepreneurship. And we sat down with the Office of the Prime Minister's Department of Refugees and fellow Mastercard Foundation partners on refugee inclusion under Young Africa Works. What ran through all three was a case for working in concert rather than in parallel. Uganda does not have an innovation shortage.

Founder's Day Café is our monthly fireside chat, held on the last Friday of every month on the fourth floor at Kanjokya House, where a founder from the ecosystem tells the honest version of their journey to a room of their peers. In August, Sharon Tumushabe, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Legacy Hills Investments, took the chair for a conversation on "Funding the Vision: Building a Startup That's Ready for Investment". Together with the room, she unpacked what investment readiness actually looks like in practice, how founders should think about the Uganda funding landscape, and what she wishes she had known earlier about raising money for a business

Can technology make education work for every learner? That was the question on this month's EdTech Mondays, where Shawn Kimuli sat down with a panel of experts for a conversation on "Inclusion by Design: Building EdTech Solutions That Leave No Learner Behind". The panel featured the team behind Visual Assistance Initiative, whose assistive technology is built so that learners who are blind or visually impaired are not designed around but designed for. It was a good reminder that inclusion is not something you add to a product at the end. It is a decision you make at the start and then keep making.