Youth business incubator opens for business in Kampala
The Mara Launchpad provides entrepreneurs and businesses with opportunities for visibility, accessibility, fully facilitated private and shared offices, access to fully resourced conference and meeting board rooms, internet, shared equipment, documenting, communication and access to business development resources like shared accounting, legal and marketing services.
Other resources include access to mentorship, business and entrepreneurship training and access to seed investment capital to enable entrepreneurs scale their businesses. This is a joint venture between Angels Finance Cooperation and Mara Foundation.
The Mara Launchpad Innovation Center
Inclusive also is the Mara Launchpad Innovation Center. This is a fully resourced flexible open collaborative place dedicated to enable early entrepreneurial innovators and tech-preneurs easily birth business ideas, start and grow their businesses. The center offers co-working spaces, a structured access to capital from diverse range of investment funds and managerial support through mentorship and business acceleration programs dedicated to the growth early business start-ups.
It also allows networking with other entrepreneurs and creative like minds to enable sharing state of art knowledge in all aspects of creating and building successful businesses like business modeling and planning, improve marketing, quality financial and organisational management so that they deliver great products and services and provide inspiring opportunities for their growth and direction towards commercialisation.
Benefits
The biggest benefit of all to the young entrepreneurs, though, is the benefit of working together in a common space. Sharing of ideas and resources, cross-selling, and professional introductions are an inevitable consequence and of immeasurable benefit to the leaders of small, growing businesses.
"I was also able to buy my first consignment of equipment through the contacts I made at the shared office facility. The business club meetings have been on topics relevant to my business, the advice from which has been priceless thus far" says Isaac Oboth, managing director at Media 256 Ltd.
"The Mara Launchpad is a well thought out incubator for start-up businesses. It has provided a conducive environment for businesses from vastly differing industries to test each other's products, share knowledge and learn from each other" added Joseph Migadde, managing director at Design Cost Build Ltd.
