Western Uganda regional winners, Mandela S.S Hoima, receiving a dummy cheque of Shs 500,000 for seed capital
Stanbic Bank Uganda has announced today the finalists who will now move to next stage of the competition to race for the top three places in the 2022 National Schools Championship with the finale taking place in July.
All the semi-finalist schools received seed capital amounting to a total of Shs 4m. Today’s winners have been selected by a panel of expert judges after going through a one-week boot-camp at Gayaza High School.
Up to this stage of the competition, the students and teachers have undergone a series of trainings on business planning, financial literacy, sales, and marketing and presentation skills.
The finalists were picked from four regions of Uganda namely, Central, Northern, Western and Eastern after presenting their business plans categorized in different sectors cutting across agriculture, ICT and manufacturing.
The regional winners/finalists are Mentor SS Lira and Muni Girls for Northern Uganda, Kiira College Butiki and Busoga High School for Eastern Uganda, Kyebambe Girls School and Madela SS Hoima for western Uganda, Bishop Cipriano KIhangire and Kibuli Secondary School for Central region.
The winners were picked from the four competition categories involving new schools (Startup Challenge); schools with existing businesses BizGrow Challenge); alumni (AlumGrowChallenge) and teachers (TeachGrow Challenge).
Cathy Adengo, the Head of Sustainability at Stanbic Bank congratulated the finalists and thanked all the other participants for their resourcefulness, enthusiasm and team spirit.
“As an annual event, the championship gives a chance to participants to keep thinking and refining their ideas as the bank supports them to realise their dreams,” Adengo said.
Emma Mugisha, the Executive Director for Stanbic Bank Uganda said, “In line with our current brand campaign ‘You are One Step Closer’, we believe that education institutions are the best places to maximize practical sessions that enable students to attain useful skills and achieve their entrepreneurial dreams.”
Mugisha said: “The boot-camp is not only a skilling session but avails networking opportunities that is a pre-requisite in the world today. The ideas presented speak to the sustainable development goals and feed into the planet, people and community needs; we are teaching these children and communities how to do business sustainably which also speaks to what we want to achieve as a bank.”
Launched in 2016, the NSC has impacted a total of 300,000 students; 1000 teachers have gone through the trainings, 2000 business ideas have been generated with slightly over 500 businesses being on the ground.
The overall theme of the NSC is ‘Empowering the job creators of tomorrow’ with the 2022 tagline being ‘I can do it.’
