About Allan Kakinda

Hello everyone,

Thanks for sparing sometime to check out my blog. I am Allan Kakinda, a 22 year old Ugandan. I am a statistician by qualification and just graduated from Makerere University, Uganda. Since 2006, I have been working with SchoolNet Uganda, helping conduct basic computer, technical and pedagogical training workshops for the students, teachers and school administrators of the member schools, working with teachers and students to join/develop tele-collaborative projects to enhance the existing curricular content, making presentations and other training materials used for training workshops, conducting training workshops and school visits for the Adobe Youth Voices project; training the members in the project schools how to create media on issues affecting their societies in order to cause positive social change.

In 2009, I did an internship with Mildmay Uganda, working in the Monitoring and Evaluation and Research departments to help assess the patients' level of satisfaction with the services that the centre provides to them for 2 months. 

I moved to iEARN USA, New York City in the summer of 2010 where I have been interning for the last 6 months and will be returning to Uganda at the end of January, 2011. During my internship, I have been helping coordinate the Adobe Youth Voices in over 23 countries around the world, facilitating the Adobe Youth Voices Online Professional development course to help teachers integrate media production into their classroom, conduct and make presentations at various local workshops in the US and international conferences on how teachers can integrate projects into their classrooms and also helped produce videos and content to be used for these trainings. 

I have also been working with kids here in the New York on the YouthCaN environmental project and we were involved in a number of environmental conservation activities such as beach cleanups, and tree planting and I am looking forward to mobilizing youth in Uganda to help improve the sanitation levels by encouraging the recycling and reuse of plastics and plastic bags to control the floods in the drainage channels in Kampala due to poor management of their disposal.

I am very passionate about social entrepreneurship and in 2009 I lead a team of 8 youth into the production of  a documentary on gender disparity in science education which was exhibited at the 2009 Adobe Youth Voices Global Summit in California, USA and a lot of inspired a lot of girls in Uganda.

I am really happy to be part of this course and I hope that through the course; I will learn how to plan and implement a successful social entrepreneurship venture, the different components of social entrepreneurship and all the necessary skills, knowledge, support and capacity relating to being successful in social entrepreneurship.  I also hope to view, reflect and learn from a number of previous and current social entrepreneurship ventures that are being implemented in different parts of the world as case studies and see how I could apply the knowledge learnt from them in the local context of my country Uganda to solve local issues that we are currently faced with. It is also an opportunity for me to meet like-minded, enthusiastic people; passionate about social entrepreneurship during this course from whom I hope to learn, share and receive feed back on my project ideas. 
 

I am really excited about this opportunity and the course and hope through our discussions, sharing of knowledge and experiences, I will be able to develop a feasible, sustainable, scalable project to help avert the poor plastic bag management situation in Uganda.

Allan Kakinda