“Made, not born”; Experiences from the Entrepreneurial Mentorship Program at Gulu University

Being part of the first cohort of the MCF@RUFORUM scholars has indeed been a blessing to the three authors of this paper. As fresh master students, we looked at the agri-entrepreneurship mentorship program at Gulu University with a lot admiration and hope. The program made possible by the partnership involving Gulu University, the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM), the Mastercard Foundation (MCF), the African Management Initiative (AMI) and Agripreneurship Alliance helped train us in business plan development, marketing, construction and interpretation of financial statements, and starting micro-enterprises. These trainings were followed by a search for viable businesses which borrow from the Students’ Enterprise Scheme in the Faculty of Agriculture and Environment. After going through the various stages of business selection including market research, scalability consideration, risk and SWOT analyses, we zeroed down to a Trusted Natural Honey business for which we share our story in this paper.