Doing The Work!

For five days at the end of September, the whole of Cohort 1 was in one room. Bootcamp 2 brought together 24 venture team members, 6 mentors and the programme team, around 42 people in all, for a week built around five themes: knowledge and capacity, business and regulatory readiness, financial and investment readiness, ecosystem and investment experience, and strategic reflection.

Building a good product is one thing. Getting it into a classroom, aligned to the curriculum and accepted by the system, is another. In September our ventures sat down with UVTAB for a technical workshop built around their own products rather than a lecture. Founders brought real use cases and asked their own questions, and the session worked through curriculum alignment, digital assessment, accessibility and special needs education, and the regulatory pathways a solution has to travel. It was the kind of conversation that usually happens in fragments over years, compressed into a day with the people who set the standards.

Last week we travelled to Salaama School for the Blind with Maria Mayanja from the Mastercard Foundation, to see the assistive technology built by Visual Assistance Initiative in the hands of the learners it was made for. We did not have to ask how it works. The children showed us. They picked up the device and demonstrated it themselves, moving through it with the ease of people who use something every day rather than people being observed. Visual Assistance Initiative's device is solar-powered, which matters in schools where the power is not something you can count on. It is one thing to describe a product as inclusive. It is another to stand in a classroom and watch a child read.

On Monday 28 September, EdTech Mondays on NTV turned to youth-led innovation in Uganda's EdTech ecosystem, and seven of our Cohort 1 ventures were in the conversation. Pacific Ogenrwoth of Maarifasasa, Kanyesigye Marion of STEM Genius, Ssenkayi Gideon of Hi Shule, Phillip Lubanga of Tambula Concepts, Herman Nyanzi of Yaaka Digital Network, Dr Olivia Aketch of AniScholar Career Hub and Valentine Masicha of MindSet Coders joined host Shawn Kimuli, alongside Allen Arinaitwe, Director of the Mastercard Foundation EdTech Fellowship at Hive Colab. Seven Ugandan founders in one conversation at eight on a Monday night is not a line-up you see often, and it is the part of visibility that matters most to us: a founder answering a question in their own voice, on a platform the whole country watches.

On 22 and 23 September, Hive Colab joined the Uganda Program Communications Community of Practice convening, alongside communications teams from other Mastercard Foundation programmes. We introduced the EdTech Fellowship to the room and talked through how we work: communications as part of how the programme delivers, not the report written at the end. Two days of comparing notes with people solving the same problems is worth a great deal when your department is two people.