Last week, The Innovation Village announced the return of Kampala Innovation Week. First organized last year, the week-long event “brings together the various stakeholders to celebrate the innovation efforts in Uganda and the region.”
This year, Kampala Innovation Week will take place from August 20 - 24 at The Innovation Village and the various hubs across Kampala. These include Design Hub Kampala and Outbox Hub. Though, Kawanguzi Japheth, the founder of The Innovation Village is hoping to have Hive Colab come on board.
The theme is “Financing Uganda’s Innovation Ecosystem". This year’s Innovation Week will thus focus on bridging the existing funding gaps. It will also seek to build on last year’s goal of building awareness and linkages.
“Last year we did the Kampala Innovation Week with the objective of building awareness around the ecosystem and why it is important,” said Japheth. Adding that they “managed to bring in corporates, government representatives, and investors.”
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The conversation the entire week will, therefore, center around identifying the available and possible ways to finance the innovation ecosystem.
Like last year, all the building blocks of the innovation ecosystem will be present. This includes academia, corporates, government, investors and other enablers.
Some of the key ones include Siemens. “Siemens will be here to share their work with corporate acceleration”, said Japheth. Other partners include the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance, Seedstars and the International Trade Centre.
“Government ministry is a partner as far as the week is concerned. We will also be with International Trade Centre and also Seedstars in as far as their view of financing ecosystems.”
Since the event focuses on financing the innovation ecosystem, Japheth says that investors must be present.
“Everything we are doing is to unlock opportunities for the ecosystem. So, investors will have an opportunity to try to understand ‘where are the opportunities for me to invest?’ Where are the entrepreneurs?’ That’s the interest for anyone that’s investing.”