Makerere University Business School (MUBS) in partnership with Mount Kenya University agrees to form strategic collaboration and partnership where the two institutions will sponsor a business plan competition to help their students and staff develops startups through designing innovative concepts to scalability.
The programme will help successful applicants to transform their ideas from concepts into viable commercial ventures.
Participation into the programme is by a call for submission of business proposals and where shortlist 50 individuals will be incubated to take part in the contest. Makerere University Business School (MUBs) and Mount Kenya Universities will each produce 25 entrepreneurs who will form 10 teams as well.
The winning group will be awarded UGX2000,000 and have its ideas developed until its products are ready for the market.
“Twenty-five Mount Kenya University applicants will be ferried to Uganda to join the Makerere team.
The 50 of them will be trained for three days, assisted to form new joint Mount Kenya–Makerere teams.
“The teams shall work together to resubmit and present jointly completed business proposals for the final selection by a panel of judges.”
The new joint initiative currently covers Kenya and Uganda but will soon be expanded to target innovators and entrepreneurs from the entire East African region,” MKU vice chancellor Stanley Waudo said recently.
He spoke during a Students Training for Entrepreneurial Promotion (STEP) ceremony. Sixty-two beneficiaries were awarded certificates.
The STEP project has been sponsored by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) under a three-year Collaboration of Entrepreneurial Universities project.
The project involves giving out loans of UGX1000,000 to groups of five to seven students to carry out businesses on campus as a co-curricular activity as they are taken through the theoretical aspects entrepreneurship. And the seed capital is returned at the end of the 12-week intensive entrepreneurship training.
The ceremony was attended by MKU co-founder Jane Nyutu and officials from the German Embassy and the Makerere University Business School.
