If you are looking for Ugandan or African Innovators, don’t look in

Accelerators

By Wamala Phillip
2nd Feb 2021

It has become normal practice to associate African Innovators with “Accelerators” spread
throughout African city suburbs. While these Accelerators (and incubators) provide
Entrepreneurial support services; shared working space, internet access, training, and
networking, they are not the best place to look when looking for Africa’s Innovators and Uganda
Innovators in particular.

Why? Because these Accelerators are elitist — often established by non Africans, mostly
Europeans, who set them up on elitist Western standards, which make them appeal to fellow
expatriates living in Africa and a few local innovators who manage to mingle in this elitist
environment — an environment which tends to feel less innovative (in the business sense) and
more social; events, forums, NGO-like causes, photo-ops, etc.

The real African innovators on the other hand, are the people working from home (in their rooms
or garages — usually sole), people with big picture ideas and solutions, people who spend
days looking for $10 (Ten USD) so that they can buy internet, people stuck in debts because
they don’t have a sustainable income flow to pay off the multiple simple loans (which they get
using their operational equipment or take on friendly basis), people who often times are behind
news and events because they are burried in getting their startups and ventures to run, people
who spend the whole year without buying themselves a new shirt or blouse, people who don’t
make it to Entrepreneurial awards or stages (because the criteria for those awards are simply
unfavorable to them), people who do side work to finance their startups/ventures (often getting
diverted from their ventures), people who are always contacting local businesses and
government agencies with proposals, ideas and concept notes — in vain; people who are
constantly searching on Google for investors who can relate with them — in vain, people who
don’t party or attend events because they simply can not match up to the requirements of such,
people who are doing extraordinary things and taking great risks, people who are too busy, with
so many moving parts, to keep track of accounting practices; people who sometimes don’t know
exactly how much they need in form of investment because they are busy trying to get their
ventures to run hence not having time to evaluate their total investment needs, etc.

They are like this not because they can’t do things differently or professionally, but because the
cost of being an innovator in Uganda and Africa is a huge. African leaders, while they admire
innovations outside Africa, don’t know yet the immediate value of home grown innovators and
an Innovator economy, and the big companies in Africa (which are by the way partly owned by
African leaders or people close to them) casually find it better to import products from outside
their countries or outside Africa. These factors naturally, and unnecessarily get African
Innovators into being as described above. And while Accelerators publicly come out marketing
themselves as solving this problem, they are not solving it in practice — for reasons stated
earlier. They instead create basic “champions” (basic entrepreneurs).

Yet, the real African innovators are serious, business oriented, and business-ready (only
needing a slight investment or a slight policy adjustment), and represent the actual description
of African Innovators — unlike the type normally found in Accelerators.

They are people ready to build their startups/ventures into profitable scalable businesses no
matter what, and care less about hyped photo-ops.

So how do you find these African innovators?

You can’t find them by googling; because they are either not on the web or do not have so much
web activity to rank high in the search engine or their websites' hosting is expired. The best
place to find them is social media (mainly Facebook, and to lesser extent, Twitter. Again,
because they are normally short of internet and are busy building their ventures). Searching for
keywords like “Innovator Uganda”, “Innovation Uganda”, “Inventor Uganda” or “Disruptive
Innovation Uganda” (in Uganda’s context) on Facebook or Twitter will get you those innovators
because chances are, they’ve written posts about themselves or generally, with such keywords.

Another place to find them is local media. While local media rarely talks about them, and when
they do, they do so hurriedly with no follow up, the local media is still a good place to look to find
that first such innovator who can lead you to the rest.

I know this because I come from this type of Innovators.

If you would like further discussion about the real Innovators of Uganda and Africa, how to
approach them, and where they are, contact me.

Note​:

Before this “Accelerator” thing disturbed the innovator/startups industry (starting in 2005 with Y
Combinator's innocent concept), here is how the ​innovator-investor or startup-investor
relationship was and should be​ (Andreesen Horowitz's way).

You can also read this article on MyCampus Knowledge ​here​.

Wamala Phillip is Ugandan Innovator, Founder and CEO - MyCampus Knowledge.

Kampala, Uganda.
phillip@mycampusknowledge.com
www.mycampusknowledge.com