Mittwoch, 20. Februar 2013

Wednesday, 20.2. - Welcome to MMU

We are picked up by MMU's dean Oliver Schmidt in the morning and share the ride with two 3rd year students in the backseat. As a hobby MTB and dirt bike rider, I would actually enjoy the road and its rural condition to the campus - sitting on the backseat and bouncing around on the axle of GIZ's jeep this is a different kind of experience...!

After an extensive tour through the university campus and catching some curious glances from students at the new 'Muzungu's' (white men) on the block, we sit down in the canteen together with Oliver and Geoffrey (heading MMU's BBDF section) and discuss the agenda for the next weeks and the topics we want to cover.  Regarding the FI cooperation project, it is planned to have a workshop in Kampala in the second week of March with staff and students from the university as well as many local banks as possible. We will have to see how this is going to materialize, since there is a general travel ban from GIZ for security reasons on the whole country starting 28.2. - 15.3. due to the elections in Kenya that are scheduled for this period.
Our discussion group is extended with Margret and Moureen, two 3rd-year students, and soon the list of topics we want to cover in the next weeks grows - so far, we have planned the following activities:
- 4 sessions / lectures on Working Capital and the corporate cash conversion cycle
- 1 session / lecture on Financial Supply Chain business, potentially a follow-up advanced session on factoring and reverse factoring
- 1 session / lecture on Product Management and Organisation
- Visiting of local banks where Margret and Moureen had worked as interns
- Establishment of a student core team from the 1st and 2nd year generation to take forward the bank cooperation project after our leave
- Feasibility thoughts on kicking off further activities of students by establishing relationships with global student associations.
Over and above such 'content matters', Felix and myself could quickly convince the university staff with our idea of actively involving the students into our initiatives rather than just offering them assistance in finding an internship or job after their exam. After all, we agreed our goal should be to make ourselves dispensable and enable the students as well as the staff to carry on the initiatives on their own. In that respect, we want to identify some key stakeholders among the students who can act as 'subject matter experts' in the future when we are away, who can also hand over their acquired knowledge to the following generations of students.

On the way back for lunch to 'downtown' Fort Portal, Philip shows us around the agricultural faculty where we get an insight into MMU's activities on the farming sector as well as the health faculty where the local population can receive treatments - currently, vision and eye-fitness is the trending topic, so we saw a lot of optical tests going on while we were there.

We pass the late afternoon with Felix participating in the weekly 'Muzungu' football match with a local referee on the grounds of the Mountain Moon hotel and myself exercising a 1h run through the countryside up to the university campus. Difficult to say what the biggest challenge was: the dust and exhaust of all kinds of motored vehicles or the 150 meters in height I made. However, any such inconveniences were compensated by the friendly people I passed along the way.

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