Pearl of Afrika
For the MySkills4Afrika program I traveled to Kampala, Uganda from Seattle to help and learn from startups. It took a little over 24 hours to reach my hotel in Kampala including 4 hour layover in Amsterdam, 1 hour drive from Entebbe (international airport) to Kampala and 1 hour of immigration stuff to get visa for Uganda. Yes, Uganda is one of the countries where you can get visa on arrival as long as you have yellow fever vaccination.
Official language in Uganda is English and almost everyone speaks English, which made it very easy to communicate. Unlike in Brazil and China where many locals didn’t speak English so I had to enact to communicate.
In the last day I happened to see two casinos — one inside the Amsterdam airport and one next to my hotel in Kampala. I guess it is a sign ☺, that I have to play poker! Maybe I will get some time in the next couple of weeks.
Airtel is one of the popular tele Communication brands in Uganda. There are lot of small Airtel stalls throughout the city. We found one next to my hotel and within 15 minutes I got a prepaid number with 3GB data plan and 20,000 shillings worth of talk time (for context, a 15 minutes international call to India cost 3500 shillings). The data plan for 3GB cost ~31USD (90,000 Ugandan shillings) about the same data rates in U.S.A. They mainly use USSD to activate the phone, add data plan and add talktime. I will cover a little bit more on USSD in the coming days, most of the startups use it for collecting data from users who dont have smart phones.
Mostly out of jetlag at this time, looking forward to work with MMindzs folks tomorrow!
