By Kefa Senoga
Many students, including those pursuing business-related courses at Uganda Christian University (UCU), have been graduating from the institution into a world of job-hunting. But that trajectory may be reversed if a collaboration plan involving UCU and the Dutch-based, Hanze University of Applied Sciences is achieved.
Top managers from the two institutions – UCU and Hanze – signed a longstanding partnership that will lead to setting up of an innovation hub at the UCU main campus in Mukono. The School of Business Innovation Hub will house display units for students’ products, office space and a conference centre.
Vincent Kisenyi, Dean of the UCU School of Business (SoB), said the hub will widen the school’s scope of operation in training and empowering students by creating an avenue of engaging with the outside community
The major purpose for setting up the hub is to foster entrepreneurship and skills development by equipping beneficiaries with practical ideas on how they can start up and manage their businesses.
Kisenyi said that Hanze University, through Hanze Foundation, helped to solicit money that was used to establish a business hub in Thelma Hall, but that it is now too small to accommodate even the students from SoB.
He noted that they are again collaborating with Hanze University to build a bigger, storied structure. “We have registered an increase in the number of students, as well as made entrepreneurship a course unit across all the courses in SoB and that is why Thelma Hall is no longer sufficient,’’ Kisenyi explained.
During the launch of the business hub at Thelma Hall in November 2020, UCU Vice Chancellor Prof. Aaron Mushengyezi noted that the institution’s partnership with Hanze University would scale up UCU’s vision of becoming a market or industrial-oriented establishment.
“We are grateful to partner with Hanze University, and we shall be able to develop other products and projects,” Mushengyezi said, noting that many students graduate from different institutions of higher learning and fail to get jobs because they have academic knowledge without real-world application abilities and that the incubation will help develop those skills.
In mid-April 2022, Prof Mushengyezi visited Hanze University, where he established stronger ties with the institution’s administration and programs.
The ceremony to unveil the site where the business hub will be built was graced by the Hanze University of Applied Sciences President, Dick Pouwels, who also serves as Executive Board Chair, at Hanze University, located in the northern Netherlands. Hanze affiliates are in the process of raising funds to help set up the hub. Pouwels visit to UCU was intended to fortify the already existing partnership between the two institutions in the different areas of collaboration and capacity building.
According to Pouwels, the progress in academics, innovations and research at UCU and Hanze University is the first concern in their collaboration. He said that their goal is to promote community development and international relations.
Namigadde Patience, a year-three student of Bachelor of Science in Accounting and Finance at UCU, said she expects the hub to create a firm foundation for business students, which will enable them to become job creators. After the SoB students held an entrepreneurship exhibition at UCU, Namigadde turned her project into a business that she is currently running. She makes hair sprays from natural products such as coconut, cloves and rosemary, among others.
