Examining the Ugandan start-up ecosystem

Focus industries:

1. Agtech: Provides an opportunity for farmers, especially in rural areas, to monitor weather conditions, plant and animal health, access the central marketplace for their produce, and use mobile payments, and agri-information services among others.

2. Fintech: There’s a focus on the fintech industry in Uganda as technology provides wide legroom for more financial inclusion given Uganda’s small banked population for instance in the mobile payments space.

3. Healthtech: Better and affordable healthcare is much more needed in Uganda across all aspects of patient care concerning safety, education, diagnosis, treatment, communication, and equity.

4. Informal sector businesses: Today, many businesses, such as retail, bodabodas, and delivery services, are struggling with several challenges, not to mention the adverse effects of COVID-19. The government has embarked on formalizing such businesses for proper planning and widening the tax base (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=255141).

Key Challenges

• Limited talent (i.e. skilled human capital)

• Unfair policy environment (taxation, regulation, and bureaucratic processes of business formalization)

• Limited access to consumer markets

• Limited capital (i.e. business financing)

The opportunities include

• increased export of high-tech products/services in the region and beyond,

• increased labor productivity, more patents,

• public expenditure skewed towards R&D

• improving standards of living,

• and ultimately contributing to revenue generation for the government as envisaged in NDPIII and Vision 2040.

  
  

General outlook:

A strong public-private partnership is paramount to fueling all these innovations. It will stimulate a co-creative environment between academia, industry, and government, which will accelerate socio-economic transformation.

The above summary will form the basis for our discussion as we chat about a way for the startup's invention, growth, and sustainability.

Special thanks to Joab Kabigumira, Baker Sseguya, and Andrew Akandwanaho!