Building Futures

Statistics can measure a gap, but they cannot capture what it feels like to sit inside one. Uganda's 35% primary completion rate, youth unemployment exceeding 17% among those aged 18 to 30 and school internet access below 30% describe the scale of a challenge, but they do not describe the teachers stretching every resource they have to give their students more than the curriculum allows, or the young person in a refugee settlement for whom quality education has always been something that happens elsewhere, or the child whose disability was long treated as a reason for absence rather than a call for inclusion.

The Mastercard Foundation EdTech Fellowship Uganda was designed with those learners in mind. And on 30 April 2026, with the signing of 12 locally led EdTech ventures into the programme’s inaugural cohort, the work of reaching them formally began.

A Programme Built on Evidence

The Fellowship is built on the premise that lasting change in education begins with truly understanding the ground beneath your feet. To do that, Hive Colab commissioned Uganda's first baseline study of the EdTech ecosystem. A diagnostic that mapped the sector's real needs, gaps, and opportunities from the ground up.

The findings indicate a sector in motion. 67% of surveyed EdTech solutions launched between 2023 and 2026, signalling a rapidly maturing landscape. But beneath that momentum lay structural challenges that threatened to stall it: severe undercapitalisation, fragmentation, and the persistent difficulty of scaling beyond pilots. Too many ventures with genuinely good ideas were not failing for lack of vision they were stalling for lack of the structured support needed to cross the threshold from promising to proven. The Fellowship was designed in direct response to that finding.