Mr Charles Ocici, the Enterprise Uganda executive director. PHOTO/NMG.
Entrepreneurs must adopt to the new challenges to steer through the hard times, according to Enterprise Uganda.
Businesses across the globe have been ravaged by Covid-19 disruptions, which according to Mr Charles Ocici, the Enterprise Uganda executive director, calls for adaptive capabilities to enable entrepreneurs maneuver through the current turbulence.
Speaking on the sidelines of the 2020 Global Entrepreneurship Week, Mr Ocici said businesses must now seek stability before drawing up forecasts.
This, he said, will be achieved through understanding that the business environment has changed thus demanding for adaptive measures.
“You should re-configure your strategy,” he said, noting that entrepreneurs must pick lessons from peers to understand how they have been able to overcome challenges.
Since the beginning of the year, there has been multiple challenges, worsened by Covid-19, which have decimated innovation capacities and created an uncertain business environment.
Mr Ocici said the current challenges were not isolated to Uganda, noting there has been a slowdown in entrepreneurship even as some new innovations have been forced onto the market.
New innovations such masks, sanitizers, face shields and such others have been one of the major items to have come on the market as a result of Covid-19.
However, amid all this, existing businesses have been struggling at a time when there is a slump in demand.
A
May 2020 United Nations Capital Development Fund and Makerere
University Business School (Mubs) survey found that 85 per cent of
businesses in Uganda were facing financial distress due to cash flow
challenges resulting from Covid-19 measures.
While presenting the survey, Dr Yusuf Kiwala from Mubs, said majority of business operations had contracted and cash flows plunged because of restriction on the movement of people.
Dr Kiwala also noted that only 15 per cent of the 1,140 surveyed businesses had indicated they could sustain more than three months of operation on their current cash flow.
Others, he said, had taken a number of adjustments to keep operations at a very minimal level.
editorial@ug.nationmedia.com
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