I am reading Dayo Olopade’s Bright Continent, and something occurred to me. Uganda seems to be everywhere. Nearly all the people I interact with in the development space have worked, lived, or toured the country physically or are one degree removed from someone doing the same. Nearly every chapter in Bright Continent highlights a project […]
There are moments when being the owner of a struggling African agricultural startup can get overwhelming and it is all I can do to quit and run for the hills. Then there are the moments when I feel like a King of the Hill and my chest fills with pride. The latter moment occurs right […]
I’ll be speaking at a panel about Women and Innovative Entrepreneurship in Uganda at Georgetown tomorrow. Join us for the screening of the short film, “Barefoot in Business,” which follows the fortunes of three Ugandan business women as they defy statistics, stereotypes and credit restrictions, and go head to head for the 2012 Female Entrepreneur of […]
Mapping chaos: With Peter Waiganjo and Dan Orwa of the University of Nairobi’s C4D lab at the school of computing and informatics, and Sarah Williams of MIT’s civic data design lab, plus support from the Rockefeller Foundation, our newly established “digital matatu” team began mapping out the system using mobiles and GPS units. A team […]
I was honored to be on Manuela Saragosa’s show, In The Balance, on BBC World Service to talk about African Enterprise and the lack of affordable capital to make them grow. What do African businessmen and women need from their governments and big institutions in order to help them start up new ventures? The President […]
I’ve long wanted to look into my countries demographic breakdown. I dug around for some numbers from Google (via World Bank data) and some from USAID. Not all numbers for each age group are available, so I had to do some simple calculations to get the totals to verify. I am not a statistician so […]
The Women Entrepreneurs Opportunity Facility is the first of its kind to be dedicated exclusively to financing women-owned small and medium businesses in developing countries. IFC will invest an initial $100 million and the Goldman Sachs Foundation will provide $32 million. IFC will manage the facility, which is expected to mobilize up to an additional […]
I currently hold the titles of CEO at www.raintreefarms.com and CMO at www.remit.ug. I know the problem of not being able to pull in VC capital all too well. Traditional VC have a vague understanding of African markets. In fact, the reason that VC turned from philanthropy is probably because he’d actually been on the ground and tried his […]
Pippa Biddle on coming to terms with the privilege inherent in the color of her skin as a ‘voluntourist (Seriously blog gods, we’ve been writing about “voluntourism” for ages now, stop auto-correcting it to ‘voluntarism’!!!)’: After six years of working in and traveling through a number of different countries where white people are in the […]
David Philips blogs at Development Without Aid, in response to Gates Foundation’s annual letter: But there is no evidence that this was to do with development aid and plenty that it was to do with Global economic conditions. But note – I speak of development aid. This is not really the business of the Gates Foundation […]