Alex Kawooya

We find his house just after the communal toilet hut. Kawooya stares for a moment, lost in memory, when he hears someone call out his childhood nickname. A man in long dreadlocks sits leaning back on the house, but it takes Kawooya a second to recognize his old neighbor. Twenty years ago, the man used to live next door. They played soccer together over there in the dirt. Here he still sat, as if he grew taller but never budged from the spot.

“I must admit some bit of me was emotional,” Kawooya says.

“It’s just unbelievable to see the contrast from where we came from to where we’re headed. Nothing much has changed, and that actually surprised me a bit.”

How little has changed in his old neighborhood shocks Kawooya, 32. He hadn’t been back in years. He figured the people he once knew had moved on, moved up – like he had.

Walking back to his Lexus SUV, a woman washing clothes recognizes him, saying his face hasn’t changed since he was a toddler. He crosses over a drainage ditch on a makeshift bridge and asks some boys why they are digging in the ditch bank. They tell him they are looking for salvage metal to sell.

When the rains came, he says the drainage ditch flooded the neighborhood and cholera outbreaks were common. He recalls being punished for playing soccer in the mud and ruining his good clothes. He greets the tailor who sewed his nursery school uniform in the same tiny room with a single sewing machine.

“It’s something I’d not prepared myself for … it was a moment for me, really,” he said. “I sat back and thought, OK, that’s 20 years ago, I can’t believe it.”

We drive through the places that mark his journey. Though his father died when he was young, his mother raised five kids who all attended university. She worked as a government civil servant, moved to a nicer home up the hill, and made certain her kids went to the best schools they could.

Makerere University sits atop one of the city’s seven hills. Kawooya studied IT there for three years. We drive to a reunion on campus playing fields, where classmates compete against other years in football and rugby, grill pork and chicken, drink beer, and complain about getting older. They are doctors, lawyers, businessmen.

Finally, we drive by his new home and up another hill to Cassia Lodge, a posh resort and restaurant overlooking Lake Victoria and the city. The contrasts from start to finish are dizzying.

Kawooya started his first business, Visions Unlimited, while still in college. Like much of Africa, Uganda was changing rapidly in the mid-2000’s with the advent of cellular communication. Whole villages and people who never had a landline suddenly had mobile phones. “There was so much happening in telecom at the time,” he says.

Since he was studying information technology at school, a cousin who had lived in Switzerland suggested they get into the telecom market as it exploded in 2007. Ugandans quickly discovered it was far cheaper to communicate using short message service (SMS) rather than phone calls or regular texts. Visions Unlimited could negotiate better deals on access to the messaging networks for customers or companies interested in large group messaging, such as planning a wedding or conference.

“You have a business plan, but you must be able to pivot,” he says. “We pivoted with my second business into hardware stuff because we saw an upcoming business and we had to jump in at the right time. That was quite profound in our education at Notre Dame.”

He signed up for YALI “to reach out and not limit myself to just what I was doing.” He has always read about American companies like Apple and Microsoft and wanted to learn for himself about how they worked. At Notre Dame, he appreciated the focus on branding, finances and long-range planning. 

Kawooya disassembles a desktop computer as we speak in his office, a suburban-style house his companies rent. A fine layer of reddish brown dust coats the computer’s interior mechanics and chokes the small cooling fan. “Dust is usually the problem,” he said. “We’ll replace their computer, clean this one up and then sell it to someone else.”