Almost a year ago today, I visited Uganda for the first time when the country invited investors and founders to discuss what it needed to do to spur investment into its super early tech ecosystem.
Here’s what I said then: “It’s a good start but still far from what the Ugandan Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovations has in the works. ‘We may not start perfect, but we’re aiming for what will work best,’ the minister told everyone in the crowd.”
Spoiler: we’re back in Uganda this week, this time for a summit on deep technology, an arm of technology focused on substantial scientific or engineering challenges. Think artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and even climate change.
It’s a different kind of conference, organised in partnership with BRAIN (Bridging Research And Innovation), an initiative of Open Startup.
Let’s back up a little. One persistent critique of conferences is that they may not always produce actionable results on a continent short on execution. BRAIN works around this problem by holding workshops during this week’s event with stakeholders from academia, government, foreign investors, and Ugandan founders who understand the lay of the land.
Over two days, participants will hear from a few panels and work in groups of six to figure out Uganda’s most significant challenges and their solutions. The problems and solutions are grouped along six themes: policy, infrastructure, funding, interconnectedness, talent, and education. At the end of the exercise, the answers from these workshops—each group presented their answers on day one—will be shared with the government.
With most of the 100 or so participants who attended the event still in their seats as Khaled Ben Jilani, a senior partner at AfricInvest, gave the closing remarks, this was remarkably strong engagement.
It was also pragmatic about the challenges. “In Africa, the demand for deep tech is very low,” said Jilani, pointing out the need for models that integrate global demand. Jilani should know a thing or two about this stuff, given that his company successfully exited InstaDeep, the Tunisian AI startup that sold for $683 million in January 2023.
