Issues, Trends and Challenges of Entrepreneurship in East Africa: The Ugandan Experience

This chapter aims to analyze the trends and issues that influence entrepreneurshipEntrepreneurship and the challenges faced by the youth in selected sectors in Uganda. Trends are long-term movements in a particular direction that determine and describe the present opportunities among entrepreneurs worldwide. Due to globalization and technological advancement, entrepreneurs have come up with various ways to change businesses, market trends as they incorporate new technologies that fit into the global market and create a competitive advantage for various sectors like education, businesses and others. In UgandaUganda, entrepreneurship has emerged as one of the ways economic and financial challenges are being resolved. Specific issues under target include but are not limited to poverty, youth and gender-related problems and others. Uganda’s government has spearheaded several initiatives and programs to curb and eliminate the root causes. The initiatives include: The Youth Livelihood Programme (YLP)Youth Livelihood Programme (YLP) and the Youth Livelihood Fund (YLF)Youth Livelihood Fund (YLF) of Uganda are government initiatives launched in accordance with the National Youth Policy (NYP) and are designed to help young people find employment by giving grants and other financial support to small groups of young business owners, facilitating their first steps into entrepreneurship. These initiatives, as a branch to achieve sustainable development goals 1 and 9, aim at increasing economic growth and creating a culture of empowerment for training and learning new things and ideas to improve and grow, especially among the youth in the dynamic digital error. Training as one of the ways to sustain empowerment, entrepreneurship and self-employment is emphasized. Although the initiatives have been put in place, they need highly skilled persons to carry out particular duties. The advancement of technology, which needs qualified human resources with the skills has forced the responsible bodies to outsource consultants. This is a problem when it comes to monitoring work done. The consideration and adoption of digitalization to positively influence entrepreneurship is vital for digital transformation and enhancement of skills. The chapter concludes that the nature of entrepreneurship in Uganda is based on the various innovations people develop and adopt. However, investing in these innovations is quite competitive with business models unable to solve the current market needs because of lack of funds, social network skillsSocial network skills and expertise. This has forced the greater pool of proposers to lack the incentives to facilitate new ideas which the Government of Uganda should rectify to be able to contribute to sustainable development goals. As a conceptual study, observations and analyzing of secondary data, existing literature, online sources and case studies were considered.