UBL’s Creative Hackathon: Winner Lands Support to Ease Business Management

When Uganda Breweries Limited (UBL) partnered with House of DJs for an innovative competition, they sought solutions that would help bridge the gaps in the ever-growing eCommerce sector, whose relevance has been boosted by the Covid-19 pandemic.

After announcing the competition dubbed the Creative Hackathon, a number of ideas were forwarded but only five projects faced off in the final round.

In the end, only two teams were rewarded, with the winning team, Local, getting Shs10 million and a six-month mentorship with UBL.

The winner also stands a chance to win further funding if their project can be rolled out to the market.

Geofrey Mutabazi, the team lead at Local, says they have developed “a logistics platform that solves and an end-to-end distribution problem by offering… ordering, stocking, delivery and customer care services (by profiling users to understand their needs)”.

Mutabazi developed the solution with Keith Ashaba, Xico Kashambo and Nicholas Mugume.

In the second position was Onduka, an Artificial Intelligence-powered chatbot that allows business owners to interact with customers.

This team is comprised of Chadrack Alfred, Jonan Katenge, Tasfanesh Marcos and Verdotte Autu. They were also rewarded but their prizes weren’t revealed.

The awarding ceremony was held on Saturday at Mfano Design Lab in Muyenga, Kampala. The hackathon run for three days.

Speaking at the event, Ronah Namanya, who heads the Spirits unit at UBL said for the winner to execute, it would need to team up with the second team since the competition wanted a solution that could offer both services.

Roy Ronald Tumwizere, the general manager of House of DJs, noted that there had been a shift in consumer behaviour and companies need to be innovative to keep up with the times.

According to an October report released by the Bank of Uganda (BoU), the value of transactions processed on the mobile money platform increased by 19.10 percent to Shs79.7 trillion compared to Shs66.9 trillion in 2019 while the volume of transactions increased by 22.1 percent to 3.1 billion from 2.5 billion in the previous year.

BoU attributed the growth to the introduction of new mobile money products and increased usage of digital solutions to mitigate the Covid-19 risks from handling paper money.

“The number of active users for mobile payments increased by 12.9 percent to 17.5 million in the year under review from 15.5 million in the previous year,” the report says.

In its telecommunications industry report released in the same month, the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) showed that mobile money accounts had grown to 25.9 million as of the end of June.

Mobile subscriptions stood at 28.4 million at the end of March, up from 26.7 million three months earlier, representing a 7% quarter-on-quarter growth as per UCC.

The report also indicated that internet subscriptions rose from 16.9 million to 18.8 million during the same period.