Tugume keen on agri-business for job creation

Tugume meets President Museveni at a recent function in Kampala. File Photo.  

By Faridah Kulabako

In Summary

Uganda has a very high rate of youth unemployment. Tugume believes that agri-business holds the key to unlocking Uganda’s youth unemployment challenge.

His entrepreneurship interests have evolved over time. Today he is driven by greater aspirations all together.

He has challenged himself to create opportunities for the youth who usually struggle to find employment.

Nelson Tugume is known for a number of projects but his current obsession is with the youth as he seeks to make a contribution to the country’s largest segment of the population.

Inspire Africa was a major break- through for Tugume, which as the chief executive officer, spurred on a project that sought to identify young minds with an excellent entrepreneurship story.

“I always dream of doing something that will impact someone’s life positively. I love to have money but I have reached a stage where I want to have a positive impact on the lives of young Ugandans who don’t have an income, something that will have a transformative effect on society,” Tugume says.

To achieve this, Tugume is embarking on a project that will see youths from across the country explore opportunities in farming, animal husbandry and poultry, among others.

The project that is still in its initial stages, according to Tugume, seeks to create thousands of jobs.

Whereas he needs about 1,000 pigs to power the project, he has so far mobilised only 100. However, he anticipates to have mobilised the required number by May next year [female pigs].

“It’s time to go beyond awareness to empowerment: Knowledge alone for an average youth is not enough, you must support aspiring entrepreneurs with seed capital to help them start and lower unemployment levels,” he says.

High number of unemployment
A report titled; “Lost Opportunity?” released early this year indicates that 61.6 per cent of Uganda’s youth are jobless.

Needless to say is that data from the government [ministry of Labour, Gender and Social Development] indicates that higher institutions of learning release about 400,000 youth into the job market annually, however, only 9,000 can be absorbed into gainful employment.

Although the government has tried out several programmes geared towards supporting youth entrepreneurship including the Youth Venture Capital Fund, not much has been achieved due to a number of fault lines that continue to dog such projects, some of which are blamed on oversight failures.

But Tugume hopes to do things differently. Among many plans, he intends to work with the youth through giving them piglets free of charge but he will recommend that the animals are reared in proper structures with a touch of modern farming.

In return, the youth will be able to provide adequate supply of grown up pigs to a pork or meat processing plant that Tugume plans to establish as soon as there is enough capacity to feed it.

“The problem in this country is production, we don’t produce enough and you can’t expect one to invest millions of dollars when there aren’t enough quantities. I want to first bridge that production gap so that the people in production are assured of the market,” he says.