Last week, Information was received from Mara Foundation offices that the organisation has opened a youth business incubator in the capital of Uganda – Kampala. Mara Foundation –A Mara Group’s non-profit social enterprise, supports young entrepreneurs on Sub-Saharan Africa.
Through a joint venture between Angels Finance Cooperation and Mara Foundation, Mara Launchpad was born- which is a is a business hub designed to enhance entrepreneurial creativity and ease the pace of growing and doing business.
The Launchpad provides entrepreneurs and businesses in Uganda with opportunities for visibility, accessibility, fully facilitated private and shared offices, access to fully resourced conference and meeting board rooms, internet, shared equipment, documenting, communication and access to business development resources like shared accounting, legal and marketing services.
Other resources include access to mentorship, business &entrepreneurship training and access to seed investment capital to enable entrepreneurs scale their businesses.
Inclusive also is the Mara Launchpad Innovation Center. This is a fully resourced flexible open collaborative place dedicated to enable early entrepreneurial innovators and tech-preneurs easily birth business ideas, start and grow their businesses. The Innovation Center offers co-working spaces, a structured access to capital from diverse range of investment funds and managerial support through mentorship and business acceleration programs dedicated to the growth early business start-ups.
The Innovation Centre also allows networking with other entrepreneurs and creative like minds to enable sharing state of art knowledge in all aspects of creating and building successful businesses like business modeling and planning, improve marketing, quality financial and organizational management so that they deliver great products and services and provide inspiring opportunities for their growth and direction towards commercialization.
Perhaps the biggest benefit of all to the young entrepreneurs, though, is the benefit of working together in a common space. Sharing of ideas and resources, cross-selling, and professional introductions are an inevitable consequence and of immeasurable benefit to the leaders of small, growing businesses.
According to Isaac Oboth, Managing Director of Media 256 Uganda Ltd, he says “I was also able to buy my first consignment of equipment through the contacts I made at the shared office facility. The business club meetings have been on topics relevant to my business, the advice from which has been priceless thus far”
Joseph Migadde of Design Cost Build Ltd adds “The Mara launchpad is a well thought out incubator for start-up businesses. It has provided a conducive environment for businesses from vastly differing industries to test each other’s products, share knowledge and learn from each other”
More information about the Mara Foundation young entrepreneurs support programmes can be found on the organisation website on www.mara-foundation.org
