By Spy Uganda
As a way of expanding their academic base and boosting job creation, Kampala International University (KIU) has established a Business Incubation Centre (BIC) to promote self-employment among youth, especially students and fresh graduates.
While commenting about this new innovation, the KIU Vice-Chancellor Prof. Mouhamad Mpezamihingo, revealed that the Business Incubation Center will provide basic infrastructure and allied facilities for researchers and young entrepreneurs who are interested in developing early-stage business ventures.
Prof. Mpezamihingo said “The center is an independent setup that will support new and startup ideas of the students and graduates in their initial development stage, by providing an array of targeted resources and services.”
KIU officials revealed to this website that services will be developed or arranged by the BIC and offered by it directly or through its network of contacts.
The VC said he hopes the Center, which is set to be officially launched a few weeks from now, will soon start contributing to the economic growth of the country by employment generation and the creation of small and medium start-up companies.
“This incubator will go a long way in enabling students acquire essential development skills necessary for the competitive industry,” the Vice-Chancellor noted.
He also revealed that the technology and communications industries will gain access to affordable, stable and highly trained software developers and engineers.
The idea of a BIC according to Prof Mpezamihingo was driven by the realization that Uganda has very few developers, yet KIU and other universities keep churning out computing graduates in different fields every year.
After explaining all about the facility, the professor later took journalists on a guided tour of the massive the Business Incubation Centre.
He said it will be housed at the topmost floor of the IBM Library building, which is the first at any private university in Uganda.
However, he noted that the University will not undertake the project alone and will depend on the private sector to source project ideas, plus providing mentors for novice developers.
The VC expressed concern that Uganda and her neighbors lack software engineers, so the BIC will offer governments an opportunity to develop local software in indigenous languages, so as to ease pushing development projects. But he said the biggest challenge currently is finding investors willing to inject money into the development project.
