The MTN Uganda Foundation is funding a second cohort of grassroots projects across the country, alongside a run of school computer-lab installations that quietly widen digital access.
By Rachel Namutebi..Kampala.5 min read
Kampala. December 20, 2024.
ProgressTechnology & Education
On 16 December 2024, MTN Uganda announced the second cohort of its Changemakers Initiative: 25 community-driven projects across the country sharing UGX 500 million in funding through the MTN Uganda Foundation. It is the sort of announcement that lands, gets a polite headline, and is forgotten by the news cycle inside a week. It should not be.
The Foundation, inaugurated in 2007 as the vehicle for MTN Uganda's corporate social investments, has spent the last two years widening its focus from one-off donations to structured, multi-year support for grassroots organisations - youth clubs, women's cooperatives, small health non-profits - that never make it into a boardroom pitch deck but that hold rural sub-counties together.
Where the money is going
Alongside Changemakers, MTN Uganda has been running a steady drumbeat of digital-access work. In October 2024, the Foundation opened a new computer lab at St. Joseph's Seminary Nyenga in Buikwe District. In September 2024, it fitted out a computer lab at the Tunaweza Foundation, a Kampala non-profit supporting children with disabilities. Neither installation is glamorous. Both change what a child can plausibly imagine doing at eighteen.
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We do not need every large company to run a foundation. We do need the ones that do to fund the boring, durable things: labs, teachers, water. That is what MTN has been doing.
Education advocate, Kampala, speaking to LivingWellUganda
The wider pattern
MTN Uganda listed on the Uganda Securities Exchange in December 2021 and now has hundreds of thousands of retail shareholders across the country. That widening of ownership is quietly reshaping what corporate social responsibility looks like at Uganda's biggest telecoms operator: the beneficiaries and the shareholders increasingly overlap.
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That does not exempt MTN Uganda from the ordinary scrutiny any dominant network operator should face on data prices, network quality and consumer protection. But on community investment in 2024, the Foundation is doing the sort of unglamorous work Uganda's development ecosystem needs more of.
How the sector, and the regulator, view it
The Uganda Communications Commission has for several years encouraged licensed operators to direct a share of their universal service obligations toward digital-literacy and access programmes, rather than treating the requirement as a line item satisfied by infrastructure alone. MTN Uganda's Foundation spending sits inside that same idea, though it is structured as voluntary corporate social investment rather than a regulatory obligation, so there is no statutory requirement forcing continuity beyond the current funding cycle.
Analysts covering Uganda's telecoms sector note that MTN's listing on the Uganda Securities Exchange has added a layer of public reporting that smaller operators do not face, giving retail shareholders and civil society a published record against which Changemakers commitments can be checked year on year.
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The test is not the announcement. It is whether the same lab has a working machine and a trained teacher two years later.
Digital-inclusion researcher, Kampala
What is worth watching is whether MTN publishes retention data on the schools it has equipped, showing which computer labs remain functional, rather than relying on the opening-day photograph as the measure of success. That, more than the size of the next Changemakers cohort, will tell whether the initiative is building durable capacity or a rolling series of ribbon-cuttings.
Evidence & documents
Every claim above is checked against the records below. Open each one to see where it comes from.
01MTN Uganda Unveils 25 Beneficiaries for Changemakers Initiative Phase II, Backed by UGX 500 Million Funding▾
