Upendo: Your word is your bond

Dar es Salaam. There is always a certain excitement that gets you going at the beginning of any project.

The prospect of endless possibilities and all the things you are setting yourself up to achieve - until it hits you that you may have bitten off more than you can chew.

"Your word is your bond. Make sure you do what you say you will do and set expectations you know you can deliver."

These words were spoken to me with a gentle emphasis by Upendo Fatukubonye, the founder and CEO of Techy8, and as I went about putting this project together, these words were a constant reminder that it was up to me to do and deliver what I said I would.

These are words that she attests to live by, especially as a woman running a tech-driven company.

Upendo has always had an inkling for tech which had laid dormant for the better part of her young life and while she is now heavily focused on building her business, she is also a tech genius and programmer.

Following the advice and push from a family friend who believed tech is the future, Upendo applied for a degree in IT, based in business computing which meant she majored in computer science as well as information systems.

Her drive was to be able to do something that maximised on her problem-solving skills which she enjoyed, especially with physics and maths.

Somewhere in between the course of her studies, she had the opportunity to put her developing skills to the test when she came back home to visit her parent and found that they had opened a brick-making business.

She used that as an opportunity to build them a system that will help them keep track of their sales, productions and other necessary records.

The practicality that came with building a fully functional system from the ground up was a thrilling experience for her and that was how she fell in love with programming, developing different business-related systems.

After graduating, she started her career at a consulting firm in Cape Town called BSG where she was based for about a year and a half before moving to Johannesburg with the same company.

Her role there was a programmer and as young as she was back then, intimidation was real when she realised, she was the only female there.

“When I joined the working world, I learnt the vast differences in comparison to school because with school, you find yourself building a system as a project with a set timeline but when you start working, you only become a piece of a bigger puzzle, all building the system and not always aware of what the other person is doing,” she explains.

“However, because I was working with others who had even more experience than me, I was able to appreciate what a good learning opportunity that was,” she adds.

“Eventually though, I began to feel the weight of the monotony because much of the work was repetitive and as a programmer, you could find yourself doing the same thing for over two years, developing the same system.”

After the lessons she picked up from working on these huge and robust systems, Upendo moved to a work as a business analyst.

This role had her handle everything apart from the actual development work. “I was involved in the testing and seeing if the requirements and objectives have been achieved, implementing them, training the users and seeing how they adapted and carry out change management,” she explains.

The opportunities, different work environments as well as diversity in the teams that Upendo was exposed to during her university years helped build her understanding of what the corporate tech side of the world operated like but she still had a curiosity for even more diversity.

“I remember reading the book Rich Dad Poor Dad and being hit by the realisation that I too was in this rat race with my poor dad mindset because I worked hard so I could spend the money. The book opened my mind on why I needed to get out of the rat race and use my salary to build assets that brought me income,” she explains.

“I then realised that every time I travelled to Tanzania, I’d have friends ask me to bring them vikoi (shawls), kangas (wraps) and even sandals. Initially, I used to just carry them as gifts but I realised that I was spending so much of my salary and basically giving it away when I could be buying these as stock and selling them,” she shares.

Eventually, she began doing just that but it slowly started presenting challenges as the demand for product grew.

Upendo’s problem-solving skill kicked into high gear when this problem threatened to get out of control and she made good on her technology knowledge.

Upendo developed a platform where vendors in Tanzania were able to join and sell their products.

This was around the year 2015 and also the first time she explored the possibility of having a multi-vendor e-commerce platform.

“I developed, deployed and started on-boarding vendors and opened business channels for them, which helped customers get variety of what they wanted and vendors were able to increase their customer base and get credit for their work,” she explains.

Once she started this platform and it was doing well, she opted to put a pause on formal employment to focus on building her business fulltime, hoping that the decision to give it her all would give her the results she was looking for.

Four months into the business, she realised she was nowhere close to breaking even and during that period, a family situation arose which necessitated her move back to Tanzania and with all these things happening, Upendo started to question if quitting was really the best move, especially considering she would spent quite a huge chunk of her savings on this endeavour.

As luck would have it, she went back on the market in search of a job, and was able to find a job in Tanzania before she travelled back. When she got back and settled in, she tried once again to get her business up and running, this time, partnering with someone to help run the business.

This quickly did not pan out as her partner was also embroiled in other ventures and did not have the full vision of what Upendo was looking for. For the second time, Upendo was force to once again shut down her business.

She worked fulltime for a period of two years after that, saved up everything she could, learning what running a business entails and when she was ready, she decided to venture into business again.

This time however, she was offered an opportunity to partner with an audit firm called Innovex.

Her role as a partner in this firm was to start the IT leg of the firm which would handle IT consultations and audits, among other things.

She worked there for another year, with the desire to have that e-commerce platform still driving her.

This partnership also helped her understand that he could diversify her problem-solving solutions and build a company that will be able to offer both IT related consultancy services as well as solutions.

As they say, ‘third time’s a charm’; armed with better understanding of the market and skill, Upendo once again ventured out on her own, this time opening Techy8 on August 8 2021.

Techy8 is built on two major pillars, the first being consultancy and the other, solutions.

“With consulting, we give service to clients who in need of services like software development, project management, change management, even electronics engineering. The solutions pillar then focuses on Techy8 developing products and putting them out on the market for people to use either as software as a service or even e-commerce platforms,” she narrates.

The reason Upendo decided to structure Techy8 this way was because experience taught her that starting with a product from the get-go may not always give you the results you want and it requires time and money to build a sustainable company.

Under Techy8, Upendo once again reopened KiAfrika which is the e-commerce platform she had tried to run in the past.

This time, however, Upendo was better equipped and positioned to begin on-boarding artisans and as KiAfrika grew, it became more than a place to buy.

KiAfrika grew to become a community where people are not simply selling and buying but also helps them learn new skills, upskill, and understand the market they serve so they are equipped and positioned to create quality products.

KiAfrika is also a place where stories of celebration, growth and assistance are shared.

“Watching this particular platform grow and the engagement that comes with it completely fascinates me because it is a constant and very real reminder of just how impactful technology can be,” she explains.

“The ups and downs were not limited to just experience, skill and financing. As a woman, I learnt first-hand how hard it can be to deliver in the tech world. There have been times when I was forced to reduce my fee to create competition and be able to get in,” she adds.

She further explains that the distrust in locally made product is already quite intense and it is emphasised when a woman is the mastermind. “For me, a further misunderstanding of the product which led to it being stereotyped as a solution for women was something I had to deal with.”

Another challenge that she highlights is the lack of competent skill and talent that is able to deliver quality product. “The skills-gap in tech is huge and those that do have the skill opt to work as freelancers which comes with its own set of challenges, especially when quality and time sensitivity is concerned and you have a freelancer who may be juggling more than one project at a time,” she shares.

“Sometimes, even the experts and experienced individuals are not as skilled as you’d like them to be. A lot of our local experts are either network fixers or work with hardware and it is hard to get good developers,” she shares, adding that on top of all this, there is a lack of continuous knowledge sharing among the few that exist.

However, the silver lining for Upendo has been the appreciation she has for what women can accomplish, with herself as a constant reminder that she must do whatever she says she would do.

“Women are attentive to detain and cannot afford to take the back seat for whatever reason. Women should be able to get into the detail of things in technology and that is why I actively groom girls coming out of university to be able to face this space head on,” she says.

“It can be daunting to start a business, let alone a tech-driven one – just do it. Once people see that you can deliver that which you said you would, your market will open up. Just make sure that you set expectations you can deliver because going back on your word will make it that much harder to make it,” she emphasises.

Supported by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation