Uganda’s Technology Boom
Business incubators in Uganda are helping young technology entrepreneurs pursue their dreams.
August 15, 2015
Ljubljana-based Ciril Jazbec was born ?in Slovenia in 1987. After studying management, he moved to the United Kingdom where in 2011 he graduated from the London College of Communication with a Master of Arts degree in photojournalism and documentary photography.
His awards include the Leica Oskar Barnack Newcomer award (2013) and the Photo Folio Review Les Rencontres d’Arles (2013). His work has been published in various media outlets including The New York Times, GEO, Der Spiegel and Neu Zürcher Zeitung.
Cellphone apps that help you argue with a taxi driver or find the cheapest petrol? Multimedia firms brimming with ambitious young video makers? Robot makers who want to transform the way schools teach math and physics? All these — and much more — can be found on the shore of lake Victoria, in Kampala, the capital of Uganda.
Supported by business incubators such as Mara Launchpad, based just across the road from Makere University, Uganda’s largest higher education institute, a host of digital start-ups run by twenty-something- year-olds are redefining perceptions of their country.
Text and photographs by Ciril Jazbec
01. Jonathan Ochan, an intern at Media 256, a video and multimedia production firm. Set up by Isaac Oboth in 2010 when he was just 20, Media 256’s clients include African and international organisations, among them Coca-Cola, the United Nations Development Programme and the Ethiopian commodities Exchange. Isaac taught himself the skills of video-making by watching online tutorials at a local internet café.
06. Daniel Ogwok, Michael Tukei and Kevin Biretwa are the developers of BodaPay, an android mobile-phone app that helps passengers negotiate a fair fare with motorcycle drivers by estimating the distance of their intended journey. They are now writing a second app for customers of taxis without meters.
Ljubljana-based Ciril Jazbec was born ?in Slovenia in 1987. After studying management, he moved to the United Kingdom where in 2011 he graduated from the London College of Communication with a Master of Arts degree in photojournalism and documentary photography. His awards include the Leica Oskar Barnack Newcomer award (2013) and the Photo Folio Review Les Rencontres d’Arles (2013). His work has been published in various media outlets including The New York Times, GEO, Der Spiegel and Neu Zürcher Zeitung.The Other Hundred is a unique photo-book project aimed telling the stories of people around the world who are not rich but who deserve to be celebrated.
The Other Hundred Entrepreneurs: 100 Faces, Places, Stories — the second volume in The Other Hundred series — focuses on the world’s everyday entrepreneurs. It captures the reality that small and medium-sized businesses, rather than tech billionaires or elite MBAs, contribute the majority of the world’s jobs, including half of all jobs in Africa and two-thirds in Asia.
The book offers an alternative to the view that most successful entrepreneurs were trained at elite business schools. Here are people who have never written a formal business plan, hired an investment bank, planned an exit strategy or dreamt of a stock market floatation. Some work for themselves, others employ a few people, still others a few hundred.
The book’s 100 stories were chosen from a pool of 10,000 images shot in nearly 150 countries. The book is published by Oneworld Publications in London and is available in bookstores worldwide and online.