In 2022, the UNDP Uganda Accelerator Lab team embarked on an assessment of Uganda’s Startup Ecosystem in Uganda, helping inform design of the National Startup Strategy Roadmap. Cognizant of contributions of the Startup community to Uganda’s economic growth, especially through emerging fintech, food-tech, software, and data startups, the sector is still ranked low as indicated by Startup Blink 2022 rankings.

Major bottlenecks stifling the emergence of new enterprises from the innovation ecosystem are:

i) Limited linkages between academia and industry due to fragmentation of various players and resources in the technology and product development value chain.
ii) Inadequate specialized facilities and human capital to support technology development, product development and commercialization in various innovation clusters.
iii) Absence of necessary regulatory policies to support growth of clusters of technology development within the ecosystem.
iv) Inadequate private sector participation in enhancement of the innovation ecosystem.
v) Limited capacity for policy implementation in Uganda’s innovation ecosystem.
vi) Inequality in distribution of innovation and research opportunities – most being urban based.

With these limitations, the government and other stakeholders, both private and public, have established innovation spaces in Uganda with the hope of nurturing innovations or startups to become meaningful enterprises that would greatly contribute to the country’s economic growth.