Meet the Pakasa youth business forum speaker

For the fifth time, Vision’s Group will hold its popular Pakasa Forum with a special focus on inspiring university students, recent graduates and those in secondary school schools, into thinking of creative means of earning a living.

The forum, which has been organized in partnership with Youth to Business (Y2B) Forum, a function of AIESEC in Uganda, will take place from 8:00am to 2:00pm tomorrow, Saturday, April 11, at the Kampala Parents’ School Auditorium in Kampala.

Vision Group CEO, Robert Kabushenga will moderate. Sebidde Kiryowa looks at who the panelists and the keynote speaker are. 


The key note speaker

Emmanuel Katongole

The 52-year-old executive chairman of Cipla Quality Chemicals is a statistician and economist, by training. He holds a Bachelor of Statistics (B.Stat) and Master of Arts in Economic Policy and Planning (MA.EPP) from Makerere University.

But it is for his role as a businessman, entrepreneur and industrialist that he is known best. Cipla Quality Chemicals Limited (QCL) is the only company in Sub-Saharan Africa that is authorized to manufacture triple-combination anti-retroviral drugs.

The company was started in 1997, when Katongole along with Randall Tierney,  Edward Martin, Francis X. Kitaka, Frederick Mutebi Kitaka and George Baguma, founded a company called Quality Chemicals Limited (QCL).

The company specialized in the importation of generic veterinary and human pharmaceuticals from India. Katongole served as Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer as well as shareholder from 1997 until 2007.

In 2004, QCL convinced Cipla, the Indian drug maker, to form a joint venture and set up a pharmaceutical factory in Uganda. Ground was broken in 2005 and the factory was commissioned in 2007. The joint venture was known as Quality Chemical Industries Limited (QCIL). Katongole served as the Chief Executive Officer of QCIL from 2007 until 2013.

In November 2013, Cipla took a controlling majority interest in QCIL, renaming the company CIPLA QCIL and appointing Katongole the Executive Chairman of the company. He remains a shareholder in the business.

Emmanuel Katongole also owns wholly or in part; Vero Food Industries Limited - Located at the Industrial and Business Park, Namanve, Wakiso District; Tinosoft Limited - an Information Technology company in Kampala; QCL - a manufacturer of antimalarial and antiretroviral medications; located in Luzira, Kampala.

He is a member of the Initiative for Global Development (IGD) - Frontier 100, a group that joins the most successful business leaders operating in frontier markets, with business leaders from Europe and the United States.

The Governing Council of IGD is co-chaired by Madeleine Albright and General Colin L. Powell, both former secretaries of State of the United States of America. Emmanuel Katongole is Rotarian and is a member of the Rotary Club of Muyenga. He has also served as the District Governor for Rotary District 9211, which comprises Tanzania and Uganda. In August 2014, Emmanuel Katongole was named Chairman of the of Uganda National Oil Company.

The panelists

Stephen Sembuya

At 31, he is the founder and CEO of Pink Food Industries, one of the fastest growing convenience foods manufacturers in Uganda. The company, which Sembuya started in 2011, produces food that includes biscuits, non-dairy creamers, chocolate, cornflakes and cocoa powder. He also runs one of the largest private cocoa farms in Uganda. He was recently named by Forbes among the 30 Most Promising Young Entrepreneurs in Africa 2015.

Sembuya, has always had a dream of starting Uganda’s first fully-fledged chocolate factory. Fortunately for him, his family already owned one of the largest private cocoa farms in Uganda in Buikwe district which has been in the family for generations.

A holder of a Bachelor of Arts in Human Resource Management from Makerere University Business School, Sembuya’s dream started as early as Senior Two at Namilyango College. He ventured into the fumigation business to start working towards raise capital for the project. He got a loan of sh1m from his father, Christopher Sembuya, Chairman of Sembule Steel Mills.

He also got loans of sh300,000 (from his sister Rebecca) and sh500,000 (from his elder brother Francis) to make a total startup capital of sh1.8m and  formed a company called City Compound and Fumigation Masters. He started with his own father’s company as a client.

After his senior six exams at Kyambogo College School in 2005, he acquired a machine from the USA at a cost of sh3m that makes badges for political campaigns; a new development in our local political campaigns.  He managed to make badges for candidate Yoweri Museveni’s 2006 and 2011 presidential bids. He also supplied 60% of all parliamentary candidates with his badges. He made sh200m from the two political campaigns. 

In 2007, Sembuya undertook the task to get the entire collection of President Yoweri Museveni’s speeches from old newspapers and the Presidential Press Unit on request and compiled and published his first book entitled Y.K Museveni’s Quotes so far which sold out. He made sh35m from this book.

Two years later, in 2009, he compiled a second book titled Museveni’s Greatest Speeches using the same information he had gathered for his first book. He made sh45m in profit.

Sembuya invested all these earnings in construction of a chocalte factory at Nakwero, Gayaza. Today, the project has thus far consumed sh500m. Part of the production line worth $125,000(sh357m) that includes equipment that churn out the final chocolate product , makes biscuits,  powder and cocoa butter, is still being held up by clearing agent SPEDAG Interfreight over unpaid and long overdue charges that Sembuya is still trying to mobilise.

Sembuya still requires working capital of about sh500m to get the factory up and running and he estimates that by May 2015, all this will have been sorted out. The main factory will have a capacity of 60 kgs per hour and 480kg of chocolate in a day. 

Jayne Frances Nakato

She is the director Kinder Kare Schools, which consists of four kindergarten schools that cater for the needs of the middle class parents in different parts of Kampala with a total population of 450 children and 83 employees (both permanent and temporary) in total. Their first branch is in Kansanga, near Kampala International University.

The second branch is in Bukoto (Old Kiira Road); third branch in Bugolobi (opposite Silver Springs Hotel) while the Elementary School is in Kitante.

But that empire built in a relatively short period of time did not come so easy. Nyakato, who worked for USAID, started by quitting her job and using a total of sh20m of her savings to set up a Kinder-Kare Pre- School in Kansanga in 2004. 

She admits the beginning was not easy. There was a lot of mismanagement, losses and low turnover. She started off six children, who were taught by three teachers. She also employed a cleaner who also cooked food for the pupils.

Her dream was however shaken by her lack of experience and proper management of finances especially in the budgeting area, leading to rampant losses at the end of the school term. That was until she started received undertaking trainings in managing her business.

She was recently nominated among the best 10 women nominated for a business award, sponsored by UNCTAD in Qatar.

Nulu Naluyombya

This 27-year-old graduate of procurement from Makerere University Business School (MUBS) is the Founder and Executive Director Success Chapter (what is this?). She overseas the strategic and operational management of Success Chapter, a not-for-profit organisation that seeks to empower young people in Uganda, especially women.

Success Chapter runs six mentorship programmes named Girls’ Leadership Academy, Wat’s Up UG Annual Conference; Women in Agriculture, Go Girls, Women in Business, as well as a Girls Education Fund.

“I imagined life is like a book with many chapters. It has a chapter when you are suffering, when you are miserable, but it also has a success chapter. The idea was to encourage people to open their success chapters,” she says.

This is a reflection of her own stages of struggle in life. Her parents divorced when she was only 14. Then her father’s business, which supported the family, collapsed. Everyone wanted her to get married then. As if that was not bad enough, she lost her mother, who had taken up the mantle of supporting her, at 18. It took the intervention of teachers for her teachers at Kawempe Muslim School, for her to continue with her education.

“I believe when you raise  a woman’s self-esteem, then they know that they can try to defend themselves, they will not be violated, they will try to speak up, they will take care of their children when they can earn an income. And when you support a woman, you get a multiplier effect,” she told the media in an earlier interview.

She is also the author of Go Girl – Success Principles for Women and a passionate speaker and trainer on a number of topics. She is also a guest lecturer in various universities both locally and internationally, notably Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Prior to Founding Success Chapter, Nulu worked with the Public Relations Office at Makerere University Business School (MUBS), the Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Uganda, and also served as the Head of Secretariat for the Joint Muslim Committee, which was instituted by President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni.

She undertook her management training from St Xavier University in Mumbai, India, and did Leadership and Conflict Resolution training from Istanbul, Turkey. She was also a Mandela Washington Fellow 2014 and completed her Civic Leadership Institute at Tulane University in Washington, D.C as part of the fellowship.

Solomon King Benge

“For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been fascinated by machines. My father stopped buying toys for me because he couldn’t see the point. I always tore them apart minutes after getting them. I simply had to find out what made them work and if I could make them better. It frustrated him, and it absolutely liberated me.”

“When dearest daddy stopped buying the toys, I started making them. Wire and rubber-band cars that ran on batteries and cassette player motors. Wooden “bikes” that rolled treacherously down the hill with us kids holding on for dear life. Helicopters that vibrated fearsomely but never got off the ground,” he told PC Tech Magazine, in 2012 after his company, Fundibots, had received recognition by Google through a Google RISE grant.

After high school, Benge built the first of his robots. However, he noticed something was amiss; in 2006 he used the internet for the first time and realized why his robot was lifeless. It was then that he discovered microcontrollers. Tiny little chips that bring robots to life, however he could not afford them.

In 2009, he told PC Tech Magazine, “someone generously and unexpectedly” handed him a collection of microcontrollers, programming boards and software – a gesture that spurred his desire to create robots again.

In 2011, he founded Fundi Bots, a robotics non-profit that uses robotics to promote better education experiences, improved career prospects and real-world technological advancement in African high schools.

In other words, Fundi Bots’ main objective is to create an atmosphere through which African children can learn and also be able to experiment with technology at an early age. This aids creativity and enables the students to practice the sciences in high school and maybe not be biased against them. The Uganda School curriculum does not support this kind of learning system.

Their dream therefore is to create a sustainable organization that that will not only help Ugandan children but also children in other developing countries.

And this they hope to achieve not just through ‘fancy’ and expensive equipment but also through involving you and me and anyone else that has a heart for the youth of developing countries.

“Apart from Google acknowledgement, our work with Fundi Bots has received recognition by the BBC, Voice of America and Wired Magazine UK,” he says.

Through his work with Fundi Bots, he was selected as a 2014 Echoing Green Fellow and a 2014 Ashoka Fellow. Echoing Green and Ashoka Fellowships provide financial, logistical and advisory support to emerging world leaders to pursue ideas that try to solve some of the world’s biggest problems.

He is the founder of Node Six, a web solutions firm offering domain, email and hosting services and creator of online Ugandan brands like Proggie.ug, Uganda’s leading entertainment and events portal.

He is also the founder Elemental Edge, a Ugandan visual effects production house that produces interactive, branding and advertising work for some of the biggest local and international brands.

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