Making Job Creators:

Joseph Kalyango did not win the Stanbic National Schools Championship (NSC) a competition organized by Stanbic Bank Uganda where students compete in a showcase of entrepreneurial ideas.

In 2020, while still a secondary school student in senior four, Kalyango and his team entered the competition with an idea for reusable sanitary pads.

They progressed through the regional stages, reached the national finals and finished third. Six years later, however, the result looks less important than what followed.

Kalyango is studying law at Uganda Christian University (UCU) on a full scholarship. He has also returned to the championship, this time as a teacher and mentor, working with students going through the same experience that first introduced him to entrepreneurship.

“When I joined the championship, we ran a real business,” he says.

The experience exposed him to accounting, marketing, production and customer management in a way that classroom lessons alone could not. More importantly, he says, it gave him an early opportunity to understand how ideas could be tested and turned into something practical.

“I didn’t win, but I’m on a full funded scholarship at UCU because of the championship,” he says.

Kalyango’s story raises a question that is becoming increasingly important as the NSC enters its second decade, what does the programme leave behind when the competition is over?

For a decade, the championship has brought entrepreneurship into Ugandan classrooms, giving students opportunities to develop ideas, test them, compete, access mentorship and, for some, secure funding. But the impact of such a programme cannot be judged only by who wins, how much money is awarded or how many businesses are created.

For some participants, the outcome may be a business; for others, it may be a scholarship, practical skills, confidence, networks or a different understanding of work.

Kalyango’s journey captures both the promise of the championship and the bigger challenge facing youth entrepreneurship in Uganda, starting young people on the journey is one thing; helping them continue is another.

When Stanbic launched the NSC in 2016, the objective was to introduce entrepreneurship to secondary school students. By 2020, the bank reported that 60,000 students from 100 schools were participating directly, with more than 600 business ideas generated and 150 businesses described as thriving.

In 2021, Stanbic reported participation from 100 schools and 400 teachers, with more than 200 businesses inspired since the programme began. Of these, 187 were actively running and 90 had received capital grants. By 2022, the programme reported reaching 300,000 students, training 1,000 teachers, generating 2,000 business ideas and supporting more than 500 businesses. In 2023, the bank said it had impacted 420,000 students, generated approximately 600 business ideas annually and brought 187 startups to life. By its tenth anniversary, participation had expanded to more than 600 schools.

The latest cycle illustrates the scale further. Diana Ondoga, Stanbic Bank’s Head of Corporate Social Investment, says more than 900 schools applied, with 200 selected for the boot camp. The field was progressively reduced to 150, 90 and 50 before 12 finalists were selected, with each receiving seed capital. Stanbic now says the programme has reached close to one million Ugandan learners directly and indirectly, while content generated through the initiative has recorded up to 35 million social-media views.

The figures demonstrate how far the programme has grown, although they also need to be read in context. Stanbic has used different measures over the years, including students reached, ideas generated, businesses on the ground, actively running businesses and startups created. These categories represent different periods and outcomes and should not necessarily be interpreted as one cumulative count of the same businesses.

The more important question is what happened to the young people and businesses behind those figures.

For Ondoga, the NSC was never intended to be simply a startup factory. At the boot camps, learners are taken through the business model canvas, selling skills, feasibility testing, design thinking and personal development. One exercise gives students Shs50,000 and challenges them to use it to buy items and make a profit within two hours.

The purpose, Ondoga says, is to change how young people understand their own economic potential.

“The child who has gone through the Stanbic National Schools Championship and seen that with 50,000 shilling I can be able to make a hundred thousand…what it does is that it has planted a seed that I can do something for myself,” she says.

That seed does not necessarily have to become a business immediately. Ondoga says the programme is also intended to produce young people who can become productive employees, problem-solvers and people capable of identifying opportunities rather than simply waiting for employment.

The broader objective, she says, is to develop “a certain quality of an employee” who can enter an organisation and contribute to its mission and vision.

Komorie Ashiraf took a different path from Kalyango. He turned his experience in the championship into Matatu Ads, a business that uses taxis as advertising platforms.

His journey illustrates what can happen when a school competition provides an idea with a bridge into the real market. The championship gave him exposure to entrepreneurship, mentorship and seed funding, while Shs2 million, released in stages, helped him register the company, open bank accounts, obtain licences and establish its initial operations.

The experience also helped Matatu Ads secure three clients by the end of the programme, giving the young company an opportunity to test its business model in the market.

But the initial funding was only the beginning. As the company moved beyond the competition environment, Ashiraf encountered a challenge familiar to many young founders: credibility.

“We’ve had companies opt to give it to other brands or other advertising agencies because they feel like Ashraf and his team are young people,” he says.

The same youthfulness that makes entrepreneurship programmes attractive can become a disadvantage when a young founder enters a market dominated by established businesses. A company may have a promising idea, a business plan and seed capital, but potential clients still have to trust the founder with their money, reputation and results.

That experience has also changed how Ashiraf thinks about funding.

“Seed capital is a trap,” he says.’’Some people misuse seed capital,’’ he adds.

He is not arguing against supporting young entrepreneurs financially. His concern is that capital can create the impression that a business is ready before the founder has developed the experience, systems, networks and market knowledge required to sustain it.

The Shs2 million helped Matatu Ads start, but keeping the company alive required customers, credibility, additional financing and the ability to compete after the initial capital was exhausted. His experience therefore exposes a crucial distinction between starting a business and building a sustainable one.

It also raises a question for entrepreneurship programmes, what happens after a young founder receives the first round of support?

Diana’s answer was that capital must come with skills.  Ondoga says Stanbic has been adjusting the programme in response to precisely these challenges. The bank’s approach, she argues, is to ensure that funding is accompanied by skills, mentorship and accountability.

“I think that the one thing about the Stanbic National Schools Championship is that it combines the push for entrepreneurship with the skilling,” she says.

A young person may say they want to open a salon, she explains, but simply giving them Shs500,000 does not mean they understand how to run the business. They first need to understand the business model, conduct a feasibility study, establish whether there is a market and determine how an idea can become a viable opportunity.

“It’s a great thing to have ideas and we encourage them, but how do you then turn that idea into a real opportunity that can help you earn money?” she says.

That philosophy has also influenced how Stanbic distributes seed capital. Ondoga says the bank previously provided the money in full but has since moved to staged disbursements. Each business is assigned a mentor, and the entrepreneur and mentor develop a list of activities and a business plan before the capital is released in batches.

“Each of the businesses is assigned a mentor. Together with the mentor they develop a list of activities and their business plan and this seed capital is dispersed at different levels to make sure that they are actually utilizing what they receive rather than giving them a full amount,” Ondoga says.

The model is intended to introduce accountability into the funding process. Ondoga says implementing partners also have people on the ground who follow up with businesses, guide learners and teachers and monitor progress.

“People are not going to tell you stories because they know that someone is going to come and check and follow up,” she says.

The programme is therefore moving beyond simply identifying the best idea and awarding money. Increasingly, the focus is on what happens between an idea and a functioning business.

That does not mean the challenge has disappeared. Teddy Ruge captures one dimension of it in a phrase that has become particularly relevant to Uganda’s young entrepreneurial population:

“Our founders are not underperforming, they’re underage.” he says in a video on his X account. 

The point is not that young founders lack ability, but that they have had less time to accumulate professional experience. A 20-year-old entrepreneur cannot reasonably have the same exposure to negotiating contracts, managing staff, raising capital, building networks and surviving business failures as someone who has spent decades in business.

Ashiraf has encountered that experience gap directly, with potential clients sometimes choosing established agencies because they perceive youth as a risk.

Ondoga, however, argues that the answer is not to wait until young people are older before introducing them to entrepreneurship.

“We are not competing with the American entrepreneur. We are building Uganda’s workforce, we are building Uganda’s entrepreneur,” she says.

Her argument is that young people should be exposed to entrepreneurship while they are still young enough to learn, experiment and make mistakes.

“Perhaps if that 45 year old entrepreneur had had a chance to go through the Stanbic National Schools Championship maybe they would have been a 28 year old entrepreneur.” she adds. 

The ambition, therefore, is not to make secondary-school students behave like experienced entrepreneurs. It is to give them a head start through design thinking and practical exercises, the programme encourages learners to identify problems and test possible solutions rather than become attached to a single idea. Ondoga acknowledges that not every idea will succeed, but argues that the process itself can equip young people with skills that remain useful beyond the competition.

“We are on a journey,” she says.

That journey becomes more complicated when students leave secondary school and enter university.

Aston Blessed Ariyamanya, coordinator of the UCU Innovation Hub and an entrepreneurship lecturer, works with students attempting to move ideas from classrooms into businesses. He sees the NSC as addressing a weakness in the education system by exposing young people to practical skills before they enter higher education and the labour market.

“The Stanbic Bank Schools Championship programme…is aiming at job creation,” Ariyamanya says. “It is a model that, I think, should have come here a long time ago. It has got a very great impact.”

But Ariyamanya also sees the gap between learning about entrepreneurship and actually doing it. He argues that Uganda’s education system has traditionally placed greater emphasis on theoretical knowledge than practical capability.

“The new curriculum is training the hands, training the heart, and training the heads,” he says.

“Traditionally, most educational institutions were focussing on training the head. But you see, when you train the head, and you leave out the hands, then you’re not helping society,” he adds.

According to him, the challenge becomes particularly visible when students receive funding to develop businesses. In 2024, UCU’s University Council approved US$10,000 in seed capital for student enterprises. Ariyamanya says some students struggled to dedicate enough time to their businesses while completing their academic work.

“I personally have struggled asking students, you have your money, please come pick it,” he says. “When they take it, then you’re asking them, where are the results? And the only thing they will tell you, sir, I have coursework to submit.” he adds. 

He adds another blunt observation: “The youth don’t want to work.”

His experience highlights a problem that competitions and seed funding cannot solve on their own. Building a company requires sustained attention, from finding customers and managing suppliers to developing products, handling finances and complying with regulations. For students, those demands have to be balanced against academic responsibilities.

For Ariyamanya, entrepreneurship therefore requires more than money. It requires mentorship, institutional support and enough time for young people to test their ideas in real markets.

In that sense, his experience and Ashiraf’s converge on the same lesson, the competition can create the spark, but the real economy demands that the entrepreneur keep the fire burning.

Uganda’s youth challenge is enormous. About 78% of the country’s population is below the age of 30, while the median age is approximately 16.7 years. The 2024 census put Uganda’s population at about 45.9 million.

At the same time, Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) data put unemployment among people aged 18–30 at 16.1%, representing more than 737,000 unemployed young people. The rate was higher among young women, at 18.7%, compared with 13.4% among young men. Another measure shows that 50.9% of Ugandans aged 18–30 were not in employment, education or training.

Against this backdrop, entrepreneurship is often presented as part of the response to youth unemployment. But Ashiraf’s experience demonstrates why the answer cannot simply be more seed money.

Young entrepreneurs need markets, mentors, incubation, networks, easier pathways into formal business and opportunities to build credibility. They also need time to learn from both success and failure.

That makes the wider ecosystem important. Banks can provide capital; schools can provide exposure; universities can provide incubation; established companies can provide markets and mentorship; government can create an environment in which young businesses can formalise and grow.

The NSC cannot provide all of these things on its own. What it can do is begin the process earlier.

That appears to be where Stanbic is taking the programme. Ondoga says the bank’s ambition is to reach Uganda’s approximately 5,000 secondary schools, not simply to increase the number of contestants but to strengthen the capacity of teachers to deliver practical entrepreneurship education.

Teachers themselves are taken through business-model and design-thinking training. Ondoga says some entrepreneurship teachers have told the bank that they had been teaching the subject without previously encountering some of the practical concepts introduced through the programme.

“If we were able to train and reach all the teachers in the 5,000 schools of entrepreneurship,” she says, “by the time a learner.finishes secondary school they can go and start a business.” she adds. 

Stanbic has also introduced a business fellowship intended to help young enterprises become more bankable, formalise their businesses, pay taxes and eventually employ others. The development recognises the gap between winning a competition and building an enterprise capable of surviving in the wider economy.

The bank also points to outcomes beyond businesses. Ondoga says more than seven scholarship beneficiaries have now graduated, while teachers who participated in the programme have later received promotions, including cases where teachers were elevated to head schools. She also points to former learners who are now at university and beyond, running businesses and earning income.

Kalyango entered the championship with a sanitary-pad business, reached the national finals and finished third. The business did not become the defining enterprise of his life, but the experience remained important enough to shape his educational journey and eventually bring him back to the programme as a mentor.

His story suggests that entrepreneurship education should not be judged only by whether a participant becomes an entrepreneur. A young person can learn how to price a product, understand customers, manage money, work in a team and recognise an opportunity. Those skills can later be applied in a business, a profession or an organisation.

Ondoga makes a similar point when she describes the programme’s objective as developing not only entrepreneurs but “a certain quality of an employee.”

That broader definition matters in a country where not every young person will become a business owner. Some will become lawyers like Kalyango, others teachers, employees, professionals or founders. The value of the programme may lie partly in helping them approach all of those paths with greater practical understanding.

The different experiences of Kalyango, Ashiraf and students at UCU point to the need for a broader approach to measuring the NSC’s long-term impact.

The number of students reached provides an indication of scale. The number of business ideas generated shows participation in the entrepreneurial process. The number of businesses created provides another measure of output. But none of these figures alone establishes whether the programme is creating lasting economic opportunities.

Stanbic’s historical figures illustrate the issue. In 2020, the bank reported more than 600 business ideas and 150 thriving businesses. In 2021, it reported 187 actively running businesses. In 2022, it reported more than 500 businesses on the ground, while in 2023 it referred to 187 startups brought to life.

These figures represent different categories and periods and should not necessarily be interpreted as one continuous count of surviving enterprises.

A stronger assessment would follow participants beyond the competition: how many businesses survive three, five or ten years later; how many generate revenue; how many employ other people; how many become formal; how many founders launch another business; how many participants enter formal employment; and how many become mentors themselves.

It would also examine the less visible outcomes: how many continue to use the financial knowledge, problem-solving skills, networks and confidence acquired through the programme even when their original business idea does not survive.

Not every failed business represents a failed entrepreneurship programme. A business can fail while the entrepreneur gains experience. An idea can change direction. A student can move into employment or further education and still apply what they learned.

Kalyango’s experience demonstrates precisely this broader form of impact. He did not win the championship, and his original business idea did not become his career, but the experience contributed to his educational journey and eventually brought him back as a mentor.

Ashiraf represents a different outcome: a participant who turned his experience into an operating company but discovered that building a sustainable enterprise required considerably more than the initial funding.

Ariyamanya’s experience shows that the challenge continues into university, where young entrepreneurs may have ideas and access to funding but still require time, mentorship and institutional support.

The NSC offers lessons that extend beyond Stanbic and could inform how schools, universities, financial institutions, policymakers and companies approach youth entrepreneurship.

Start early. Introducing entrepreneurship while students are still in secondary school gives them an opportunity to develop practical skills before they enter university or the labour market.

Combine capital with skills and mentorship. Ashiraf’s experience shows that seed funding can start a business, but it cannot replace market knowledge, credibility, networks and experienced guidance. Stanbic’s move towards staged funding and mentorship reflects this lesson.

Build continuity beyond the competition. A competition should be a starting point rather than an endpoint. Universities, innovation hubs, incubators, accelerators, financial institutions and businesses can provide the next layer of support.

Create room to practise. Ariyamanya’s experience shows that young people can struggle to build businesses when entrepreneurship is added to an already demanding academic workload. Practical entrepreneurship requires time and space to test ideas in real markets.

Measure impact over time. Following participants for three, five and ten years would provide a stronger picture of whether businesses survive, jobs are created and skills acquired through the programme continue to be used.

Define success broadly. Not every participant will become an entrepreneur. Scholarships, employability, financial literacy, problem-solving skills, confidence, professional networks and mentorship can also be meaningful outcomes.

More corporate investment can strengthen the ecosystem

The NSC also demonstrates what sustained corporate social investment can achieve when it is maintained over several years. However, Uganda’s youth challenge is too large for one institution to address alone.

More companies can use their corporate social investment programmes to support youth entrepreneurship through funding, mentorship, incubation, technology and market access. Established businesses can also give young enterprises opportunities to become suppliers, partners or service providers, creating a pathway from training to actual commercial participation.

The opportunity is therefore to move beyond sponsoring individual competitions and build a stronger pipeline from school, to skills, to capital, to markets and ultimately to sustainable businesses.

Stanbic’s experience provides one model, but broader private-sector participation could extend its reach and strengthen the ecosystem around young entrepreneurs.

Ten years of the Stanbic NSC  have produced competitions, business ideas, seed capital, scholarships and mentorship and, according to the bank, reached close to one million learners directly and indirectly. But some of the most revealing stories do not end on the competition stage.

Kalyango did not win, yet he went on to university and eventually returned as a mentor. Ashiraf turned his championship experience into Matatu Ads but discovered that building a sustainable company required much more than the Shs2 million that helped him start. Ariyamanya sees young people struggling with the transition from theory to execution, while Ruge points to the experience gap facing young founders. Ondoga’s response is that this is precisely why entrepreneurship education has to begin early and combine practical skills, mentorship, accountability and staged funding.

The NSC is therefore evolving from a competition into something closer to a pathway,  identify an idea, test it, learn the fundamentals, receive mentorship, access capital, demonstrate progress and, eventually, become a more formal and bankable enterprise.

The pathway is not complete, and the experiences of young entrepreneurs show why. Markets remain difficult, credibility takes time to build, capital remains limited and even motivated students can struggle to balance enterprise with education.

The championship cannot solve Uganda’s youth employment challenge on its own. What it can do is change the starting point by giving young people an early opportunity to experiment, fail, learn and recognise possibilities that might otherwise remain invisible.

For Kalyango, that opportunity eventually led somewhere different from the business idea he entered with. For Ashiraf, it became the foundation for a company that continues to face the realities of the market. For Stanbic, it has become a decade-long experiment in taking entrepreneurship education beyond the classroom.

The competition may end with applause. The more important measure is what remains when the applause is gone.