First GSL Course Offered in Uganda at Makerere University

Makerere University in partnership with MIT Global Startup Labs conducted the first GSL course in Uganda from 11th June to 23rd July 2019 at Makerere Innovation & Incubation Center.

GSL is designed to teach students the skills necessary for starting a mobile tech startup. It’s an intensive boot-camp where students work in teams to develop and ultimately launch a mobile-app startup business. The course ends with a pitch day where each team pitches its startup idea and prototype to potential investors with the expectation that team continues to develop its startup ideas after the course ends. 

The GSL Uganda 2019 class curriculum was modeled after many incubator courses and previous GSL courses at MIT, and it included three major areas, which are the key ingredients to launching a successful agrotech venture i.e. Entrepreneurship & Business Skills, Technical Skills and Soft Skills like communication, leadership and teamwork.

Students from College of Computing of information Sciences, College of Business Management and College of Agricultural  and Environmental Sciences participated in the course and were grouped into teams of 3-5 students that worked together throughout the course to form and launch an agrotech startup. The teams developed their startup ideas and built a prototype for their application (mobile or web app). 

The GSL Uganda 2019 course was taught by a group of MIT graduate and undergraduate students listed below:

• Jezze Jao (Entrepreneurship Lead) :  Jezze  is a recent MBA graduate at MIT
• Keita Zenki (Entrepreneurship Lead) :  Keita is a 1st year MBA student at MIT
• Eleanor Wintersteen (Entrepreneurship Assistant):  Eleanor is a recent graduate in Biology at MIT.
• Emily Tang (Technical Lead): Emily is a recent graduate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.
• Jeremy Cowham (Technical Lead ):  Jeremy is a Computer Science and Engineering student entering his fourth undergraduate year at MIT.

Course was concluded with a pitch day that took place on Friday 19th July 2019 where five teams pitched their startup ideas and prototypes to a panel of judges and an audience of investors. The winning team received funding to move forward their startup idea.