Background: Conference planned by the Regional Universities Venture Hub
In 2018, the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture, in partnership with The Mastercard Foundation, launched the eight-year Transforming African Agricultural Universities to Meaningfully Contribute to Africa’s Growth and Development (TAGDev) Programme. The programme was designed to transform African agricultural universities and their graduates so they could better respond to the continent’s development challenges through the application of science, technology, business, and innovation to drive rural agricultural transformation.
A key component of the TAGDev Programme was the vision of nurturing a new generation of young agribusiness leaders by creating an enabling environment where university-based startups, innovations, and disruptive ideas could be accelerated into viable enterprises that serve communities and stimulate youth-led economic development across Africa. This vision was implemented through the RUFORUM Agricultural Enterprises Challenge Programme (RECAP).
RECAP was established to strengthen entrepreneurship education and increase the impact of universities by supporting the establishment and strengthening of Agri-Enterprise Innovation Hubs (AIHs). These hubs were intended to foster agricultural enterprise development by equipping students, graduates, and young entrepreneurs with entrepreneurial, business development, and innovation skills.
Nine African universities, including Uganda Christian University, participated in establishing and operationalizing their Agri-Enterprise Innovation Hubs. After closing the project, a long-term sustainability strategy was thought to advance the approach and culminated in the establishment of the Regional Universities Venture Hub (RUVH). A research network that was subsequently registered as a research network in Uganda.
Today, the Regional Universities Venture Hub continues to advance the RECAP vision by supporting academic transformation and testing models to better Africa. The network promotes collaboration among universities, especially in postgraduate-level studies, the private sector, development partners, governments and farming communities to accelerate the development of practical models for postgraduate studies.
Through partnerships with institutions, the RUVenture Hub would bridge academic training of postgraduate students’ models with a transformation-to-scale approach to enhance the capacity of universities and relevance across Africa.
Against this background, we provide further information on the Regional Universities Venture Hub, its objectives and programs, and the upcoming conference scheduled for 1–12 March 2027, available on the Venture Hub’s website, www.ruventurehub.com.