I am Andrea Cantarella, from Catania. I’m currently studying Markets and Business Strategy at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. I’m writing from the Uganda Martyrs University offices in Kampala, where I started an interesting experience with E4Impact in February 2019.
I’m writing about my experience here in Uganda, just after finishing a wonderful event that my colleagues and I have organized with the local staff: the first E4Impact Community Event. Objective of the event was to develop the E4Impact network of Ugandan entrepreneurs; for this reason we had decided to organize an exhibition day, in order to give the opportunity to the entrepreneurs of the current edition to exhibit and present their businesses to the Alumni of the past editions. Organizing the event was exciting but also very tiring, because a night storm destroyed all the tents that we had build for the exhibition and we had to rearrange them! This is the raining season in Uganda and that storm made me understand why this season is called in this way!
Despite this little accident, I’m very proud of the outcomes of the event, the entrepreneurs where all happy and we had 49 of them joining the exhibition.
Working here in Kampala gave me the opportunity also to go through many one-to-one meetings with the entrepreneurs of the MBA and to get to know their businesses better. By doing so, I’ve understood the big differences that exist between the European way of working and the Ugandan one, and the difficulties that the entrepreneurs of this Country have to overcome to start their own businesses. However, despite the lack of rosources, the desire to succeed is great!
When I’ve decided to come to Africa I did it because I’m very passionate about travelling and because I wanted to undertake a different internship than the usual ones. But now, after spending some time in this amazing country, I have grown on a human level and I have found more than one reason to come back in the future.
Andrea Cantarella