_{By Carol Kasujja and Betty Kyakuwa}

Running a side business alongside full-time employment has become an increasingly popular venture among staff. For many, it is a way to supplement income and build financial resilience. For Ms. Rebecca Talikaza, a 48-year-old custodian, it has become a pathway to transformation. Talikaza successfully balances her office responsibilities with her growing enterprise, Beckiz Bathing Sponge.

“For the years I have been running Beckiz Bathing Sponge, my side business has not affected my work. I have a support system at home, and I have learnt how to utilize my time well,” she explains.

Turning Necessity into Opportunity

Talikaza’s entrepreneurial journey began during the COVID-19 period, when schools reopened. While preparing to take her first-born son back to school, she realized he did not have a bathing sponge. A search in nearby supermarkets in Nakwero proved futile.

“When I failed to get a bathing sponge, I went back home and looked for some material I had bought earlier. I became creative and decided to knit one using skills I had acquired in primary school,” she recalls.

As she worked, a neighbor noticed her and expressed interest. “When I told her I was knitting a sponge, she asked me to make four for her,” Talikaza says. After completing the order, her neighbor paid her UGX 20,000.

That same day, a boda boda rider she had sent on an errand also requested one. “He told me instead of giving him money, I should give him a sponge. That is when it hit me—I could actually make money from this. Every home needs two or three sponges,” she says.

From Small Orders to Supermarket Shelves

Encouraged by the demand, Talikaza approached Babis Supermarket in Nakwero with her sample. She requested to supply her products after noticing the gap in the market. The manager agreed and asked her to produce two dozen sponges for distribution across five branches.

She also secured a similar opportunity with Shop Wise Supermarket in Manyangwa Village. “Both supermarkets accepted, but it took me three weeks to deliver. I had to sacrifice my sleep, sometimes working until 2:00 a.m. to meet the demand,” she says.

Her first delivery earned her UGX 54,000 per dozen, with each sponge retailing at UGX 5,000. Drawing on knowledge from her Postgraduate Diploma in Business Administration at Makerere University Business School, Talikaza realized the importance of branding and packaging. “I knew I had to register my business and package my products well because my target customers value quality,” she explains.

Improved packaging doubled the price of her sponges from UGX 5,000 to UGX 10,000. Since then, the business has steadily grown, enabling her to pay school fees and purchase land.

Challenges Along the Way

Despite her success, Talikaza faces challenges, particularly with delayed payments from supermarkets.

“Some supermarkets take long to pay, yet I need money to buy materials, so I end up using funds from other sources,” she says.

She also points to the difficulty small businesses face in meeting formal requirements. “Some supermarkets require invoices, which is challenging for small businesses like mine. Without them, we are taxed heavily,” she adds.

Advice on Managing a Side Hustle

Talikaza emphasizes discipline, sacrifice, and humility as key ingredients for success. “Never despise humble beginnings. Side businesses do not accommodate laziness. If it means working late, do so to ensure growth and profit,” she advises.

She also stresses the importance of fairness and teamwork, noting that she employs her children and a maid to help with production—and pays them weekly. To maintain professionalism, Talikaza draws a clear boundary between her job and her business.

“Your office work should not suffer because of your side hustle. I do not sell my products at the University. Those who need them can find them in supermarkets,” she says. She recommends careful time management, dedicating working hours to official duties and reserving evenings or weekends for business.

Efficiency, she adds, is critical. “I do not leave work to buy materials. I send a boda boda rider who delivers on time. He even helps monitor stock in supermarkets,” she explains. Above all, Talikaza encourages aspiring entrepreneurs to build businesses around passion and knowledge.

“Understand your business—its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Also know your target market to avoid being cheated,” she says.

At a Glance

Born to Mr. Nathan Magoola and the late Gladys Magoola, Talikaza hails from Iganga District. She attended Iganga Municipal Council Primary School before joining St. Peter’s Secondary School, Naalya, for both O-Level and A-Level.

She later earned a Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences from Makerere University, followed by a Master’s degree in Gender and Women Studies and a Postgraduate Diploma in Business Administration.

The 10^th born in a family of 14, Talikaza is a mother of six children.

Falling Walls Lab is coming to Kampala, Uganda.

Which wall will your research break? Pitch your innovative idea in just three minutes, showcasing a breakthrough that positively impacts science and society.
 

Where
Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda

When
14 September 2026

Local Organiser & Partners
Alliance for African Partnership Africa Office (AAP), Makerere University, Astria Learning, Makerere University Research and Innovation Fund (Mak-RIF); Makerere University Writing Center; Institute of Gender and Development Studies (IGDS); Makerere University Technology and Innovations Center (MUTIC)

Deadline
25 August 2026

Apply Now

Contact
aap@mak.ac.ug
rachealddungu@gmail.com

Beyond the technology and value addition work at the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (CAES), the Minister’s first day at Makerere University carried him to two additional stops. Each offered a different picture of how deep the University’s research base runs, before day two shifted the conversation from laboratories to a national action plan built jointly with the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation.

Appreciating the Foundation of Applied and other Sciences

At the College of Natural Sciences, the Minister was taken through a set of platforms that rarely attract public attention but underpin much of the University’s scientific output. Chief among them was the site and development plan for a proposed Nuclear Magnetic Resonance facility, a piece of equipment that, once built, would give Makerere researchers and students the ability to analyse molecular structures in ways currently only possible by sending samples abroad. Facility leads explained what such a facility would mean for chemistry, pharmaceutical research and materials science on campus, and the Minister engaged closely on what it would take, in funding and partnership terms, to move the project from plan to construction.

The College also presented selected materials, chemistry and biotechnology platforms already in active use, work that quietly feeds into much of the applied research showcased earlier in the day at CEDAT and CAES. Alongside this, researchers walked the Minister through ongoing work in space science, earth observation and geospatial technologies, fields that Makerere has been building up steadily and that carry obvious relevance for agriculture, environmental monitoring, disaster response and urban planning nationally. It was, in many ways, the most understated stop of the day, but also one of the clearest reminders that the flashier innovations seen elsewhere on campus rest on a foundation of basic scientific capability that the College of Natural Sciences exists to nurture.

The Innovation and Commercialisation Ecosystem

The day’s programme reached its final stop at UniPod and the Makerere University Technology Innovation Centre, and for many in the delegation, this was where the argument the University had been building all day came together most clearly. Student innovators, research teams and incubated start ups had prepared demonstrations that walked the Minister through the full pipeline his hosts had been describing since morning, from digital fabrication and makerspace tools that let a student turn a sketch into a working part, through to businesses that had already found their first paying customers.

The Minister was shown concrete evidence of innovations that had made the journey from prototype to certification, from certification to investment, and in a handful of cases, from investment to production and market entry. He spent time speaking directly with several young innovators, asking not the polite questions of a formal tour but the practical ones an investor might ask, about the origins of their ideas, the setbacks they had run into moving from a working model to something reliable enough to sell, and what exactly stood between where they were and where they wanted to be. Several of the students described spending months, sometimes years, refining a single component or feature before it was ready to show anyone outside their research group, work that rarely appears in the polished demonstrations visitors eventually see but that accounts for most of the actual effort behind them.

Discussion at this final stop centred on intellectual property protection, licensing arrangements, incubation support, venture financing and industry linkage, the unglamorous scaffolding that determines whether a good idea becomes a company or simply stays a good idea. University officials noted that UniPod’s role has increasingly become less about the physical fabrication tools it houses, though those remain heavily used, and more about walking student innovators through exactly this scaffolding, connecting them to legal support for patent filings, to potential investors, and to industry partners willing to pilot an unproven technology. It was a fitting note to close on, tying together the strategic remarks made that morning about commercialisation with the tangible, sometimes unfinished work of the students trying to achieve it.

Day One Ends on a High

With the day’s tours complete, University leadership and the Science, Technology and Innovation Office in the Office of the President used the closing hour to take stock, confirming which issues raised across the day, funding gaps, equipment needs, regulatory bottlenecks and partnership opportunities among them, would be carried forward for deeper attention on day two.

Feeling the Pulse of Health Sciences

Day two of the visit on 22^nd July 2026 turned the delegation’s attention from engineering workshops and computing laboratories to the University’s health and life sciences base, a cluster of research capacity that Makerere has built up over decades and that carries some of the clearest examples of research shaping national policy and practice. At the College of Health Sciences, the Minister was taken through the Makerere University Biomedical Research Centre, along with genomics, molecular and immunology laboratories whose biobanks and associated bioinformatics capacity now support research well beyond the College’s own walls. Researchers presented work on medical devices, diagnostics and biomarkers moving through clinical research and translation pathways, and the conversation turned, as it had the day before at CEDAT, to the practicalities of getting this work certified, accredited and eventually linked to local manufacturing rather than leaving finished designs to be produced elsewhere.

Influencing Public Health Outcomes beyond Academia

At the Makerere University School of Public Health, the focus shifted from laboratory bench work to population level research, surveillance systems and the health data platforms the School has built to support implementation research and policy translation. The Minister was walked through examples of School research that had gone on to shape national health programmes or been scaled into solutions used well beyond the University, a reminder that not all of Makerere‘s most consequential work happens inside a laboratory. Much of this research, staff noted, had been carried out with heavy involvement from graduate students working on theses tied directly to live public health problems.

Scaling-up Impact through Global Partnerships

The Infectious Diseases Institute offered a further layer to the health sciences picture, with its flagship laboratories, diagnostics platforms and biotechnology capacity, alongside compute and artificial intelligence infrastructure supporting clinical and infectious disease research. The Institute’s global research partnerships came up repeatedly in discussion, framed less as prestige collaborations and more as pathways through which locally developed technology could reach international markets and support, in turn, further enterprise creation at home. It was a fitting point at which to close out the health sciences segment of the visit, the Institute’s work drawing together the biomedical research, public health data and diagnostic capacity the Minister had been shown across the cluster, and pointing, as much of the previous day had, toward the same underlying question of how to move strong research further and faster toward practical, sellable outcomes.

Unpacking an Eventful Two Days

The second day’s centrepiece, however, was not another laboratory tour but a strategic dialogue on translating research into products, enterprises and national impact, a session that brought researchers and innovators face to face with the barriers that keep good science from becoming a good business. Presenters spoke candidly about the practical obstacles to technology translation and scale, touching on intellectual property protection, regulation, certification, procurement processes, industry partnerships, venture financing and the basic commercial management skills that many research teams simply do not have. The session deliberately widened beyond the science and technology colleges themselves, drawing in defined contributions from the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the School of Law, the College of Business and Management Sciences, and the College of Education and External Studies, each speaking to a piece of the puzzle that pure science cannot solve alone, innovation culture, technology law, business development, communication, STEM human capital and the harder question of how new technologies actually get adopted by ordinary people and institutions.

That dialogue fed directly into a curated session of innovation and enterprise pitches, in which a select group of the University’s most promising technologies, spin off companies and student enterprises were given a short, structured window to make their case. Each pitch followed the same disciplined format, a brief statement of the problem being addressed, how far the technology had matured, its intellectual property position, whatever evidence of validation existed, the target market, the financing needed to move forward, and the single next milestone that would matter most. It was a deliberately commercial exercise, closer in spirit to an investment pitch than an academic presentation, and it gave the Minister a compressed but vivid sense of the University’s innovation pipeline at its most advanced and most investment ready.

Forging a National Action Plan

The two-day visit closed with an exit session built around adopting an agreed action matrix, the practical outcome the Ministry and University leadership had been working toward from the very first courtesy call. The Minister offered his observations and strategic guidance on what he had seen across both days, and University leadership joined Ministry officials in setting out agreed actions, the institutions and officers responsible for each, the timelines attached to them, and the mechanism by which progress would be measured. A joint press briefing and closing remarks brought the Minister’s maiden visit to Makerere University to an end, with both sides describing the two days as a starting point rather than a conclusion, the first working step in a relationship University leadership expects to deepen considerably as the agreed actions begin to move from paper into practice.

On the whole, the Minister’s maiden visit offered Makerere University an unusually direct platform to make its case, not through published statistics or polished brochures but through its own researchers, its own facilities and, most persistently throughout both days, its own students, standing at their benches and workstations, explaining in their own words what they had built and what it would take to take it further.