Hello, my name is Ngabirano Keneth. I am 26 years old. “The Complete Upgrade Effort” is my first blog. I was born and live in Uganda, Africa. I believe Africa can become developed in our lifetime.
What I do
I am striving for the achievement of human development in Uganda without non-renewable resource consumption, environmental degradation and pollution.
Currently, I am spending my all to modernize and green how the people of Uganda produce. Because most production in Uganda is traditional, informal and outdated causing most of the population to suffer underdevelopment symptoms like poverty, disease, ill health and others. Even worse, their poor conditions and direct dependence on the environment makes these people the most vulnerable to climate change and environmental degradation.
I know that if the subsistence producers and local businesses that do most of production are upgraded using modern and green upgrades, the badly needed human development can be achieved without pollution and environmental degradation.
Childhood
I was born and raised in abject poverty. My parents and almost everyone in my village are subsistence farmers who practice peasantry. Throughout my childhood, I watched my mother’s harvest diminish season after season due to late rains, heavy rains, drought and other climate shocks. I witnessed firsthand the suffering this caused when our source of livelihood vanished.
Due to this background, I have been driven to research and study about to find a way how people living in poverty can transform their livelihoods reduce their vulnerability to climate shocks and afford decent lives.
Education
I am an autodidact, and have self educated in many fields like electronics, metalwork and others. In 2012, I got a government sponsorship to study Agriculture Economics from Makerere University. This was a great chance to study in detail what is holding back Ugandans most of who depend on agriculture for their livelihoods. I graduated in march 2017.
Starting APGRADE:
In 2016, I used saved study sponsorship allowances while at university and registered a social benefit company called APGRADE to modernize local production. But my approach, which was to open a machine shop, create and sell machines that modernised how people produced didn’t go well.
Had thought that mechanization alone would provide the boost to modernization of production, but I was wrong. The local producers lacked the money to afford them and even when they could, they lacked a system to benefit from them.
As a result, a year ago my machine making attempts failed. I lost everything and everyone. I was left penniless and homeless. Still I got more determined to create a comeback with an effort that provided a green complete upgrade to local production.
Need for a green complete upgrade comeback:
I realized mechanization was one of the upgrades they needed. Alongside improved green technology upgrades, they needed upgrades in other areas such as production capital, management, organization, product development and others.
Any penny I have earned from different temporary jobs has been used to find out how a green complete upgrade of local producers can be done. I have spent the past year, interacting with local producers and local businesses in Uganda to find out sure ways to modernize and green their production.
From this research, I have been designed green modernization projects. These projects organize local producers into startups and provide a complete system any producer can hook into to modernize and green how he/she produces.
Financial struggle:
During my quest last year, I sometimes had to sleep hungry for days. Had to give up on any decent shelter, my clothes have turned into tatters, and once I almost lost my life when I had to sleep outside. But so far all my trials to launch a pilot green modernization project have failed because of lack of seed capital.
The complete upgrade effort:
I started the blog “the complete upgrade effort” to look for the supporter who can help me raise the needed seed capital to start the first green modernization project. The person whose name this unique project will carry.
The Complete Upgrade Effort 