Yesterday, I had been asked to give one of the keynote addresses at the launch of Allen Akankunda’s Wings From Ashes.

I expected to speak about young people, mentorship, resilience and what those of us who have gone a little further down the road owe the generation coming behind us.

Then somewhere around page 26, I stopped reading as somebody preparing a keynote. I began reading as a Ugandan and realised that this book was actually about money.

Well, not entirely. It is about girlhood, family, education, identity, abuse, choice and becoming. But money sits quietly underneath so much of what happens to this one family: who gets to go to school, who has to wait, what a mother can recover from, what one emergency can destroy and even what a child begins to believe is possible for her.

Money matters.

Not because money is the whole story, but because sometimes money determines how much of the story a person is allowed to participate in.

Mia is looking at children attending the better school Allen describes in the book. They have clean uniforms, closed shoes and confident English. Their world feels close enough for her to see but not quite close enough for her family to reach. And she prays:

“Lord, give us money…”

That prayer stayed with me because Mia had plenty of other things she could have asked God for. She could have asked for the present, loving father she did not really have. She could have asked for good health; frightening illness and seizures had already marked her childhood. Instead, she asks for money so her mother can afford that school too, so they can wear shoes and speak English like those children.

Then we meet her brother, Jack. He is old enough and bright enough to be in proper school, but he is home grazing calves because fees, books and uniforms still have to be “searched for.”

Then there is their mother, Kebikomi, carrying this entire little economy. She starts with a few sodas, soap, sweets in jars and tiny profits. She saves. A flood destroys stock bought with months of savings. Rent still comes. Food still has to be found. Then thieves break in and take the day’s earnings and the emergency cash.

It is one family: a daughter looking across at another school and praying for a chance, her brother at home while school fees are being searched for, and their mother working, saving and sacrificing while one shock after another attacks the same small pool of money.

And Ugandans know what searching for school fees looks like. A mother sells tomatoes. Dad sells a goat. Someone sends fifty thousand from Kampala. An aunt adds twenty. Coffee is harvested. A customer finally clears an old debt. Five thousand is put aside today, perhaps nothing tomorrow, and somehow, piece by piece, a family tries to assemble a school term.

Except the school term arrives on time whether the money has arrived or not.

But poverty does not only affect what Mia can buy. It begins affecting how she sees herself. She watches other children and feels poorer, different, less loved. She begins lying about her absent father, creating a version of him that makes her life sound more like theirs. Then she starts taking sweets from her mother’s kiosk and giving them to children at school.

Yes, Mia was stealing sweets. But what she was really trying to buy was belonging.

Her mother was right to correct the stealing, but there is something in that scene for those of us raising, teaching and mentoring children. Sometimes we need to look beyond the behaviour long enough to ask what is underneath it. Is this child looking for attention, dignity, acceptance, the feeling that they are not less than everybody else?

Poverty does not excuse poor choices. But lack and exclusion can create pressures inside children long before they have the maturity or language to explain what they are feeling.

Sometimes what looks like a behavior problem has another problem sitting underneath it.

Then Allen takes us back to Kebikomi, who gathers women under a mango tree. They contribute fifty shillings here, one hundred there. Five women become ten, ten become fifteen. The money begins helping someone buy seeds, someone buy stock, someone start tailoring, someone survive an emergency.

Kebikomi tells them:

“We don’t have much, but together, we have more.”

I smiled when I read that. Apparently some of Africa’s most enduring financial innovation did not begin in an innovation hub. It began under mango trees. Women already understood that little plus little plus little could become capacity; that community could become capital; that when one person fell, several others could absorb part of the shock.

And importantly, Allen does not leave Mia in those circumstances. Mia eventually goes to university, becomes a school counsellor, listens to girls carrying some of the same fears and pressures she once knew, and creates Sparks of Choice to help other young people discover their potential. The little girl who once looked at another school and prayed for opportunity eventually becomes a woman creating opportunity for somebody else. Her story comes full circle on an international stage.

So yes, Mia is resilient. Kebikomi is resilient. The women under the mango tree are resilient. Their resilience yields something beautiful.

Which is precisely where I want to be slightly troublesome.

Maybe we Africans are too in love with resilience.

Especially resilience in women.

We love the story of the mother who somehow educates six children, the trader who loses her stock and starts again, the widow who keeps the household standing, the woman who can turn UGX 10,000 into supper, transport, tomorrow’s stock and somehow still find the PTA money.

We clap. We call her strong. We write conference themes about her.

But maybe she is tired.

Maybe honoring African women should mean more than admiring how much suffering they can carry without falling apart.

Maybe the next act is not another standing ovation for how beautifully people survive difficult systems.

Maybe it is simply to build things that make life easier.

And this is where Allen’s fictional family became intensely personal for me.

Reading those pages made me extremely proud to be the Founding CEO of a payments technology company building for this exact family.

We are building for the person whose income comes in pieces, so saving should also be possible in pieces. Piggy Banks for the things families are building towards. Multiple wallets because money has different jobs. Digital tools for savings groups and SACCOs because Kebikomi’s truth still holds: together, we have more.

We are building school-payment and management infrastructure for the parent still “searching for” fees and the school trying to see what has been paid and what remains. Responsible financing pathways for moments when someone is not necessarily poor but simply temporarily short. And different ways into the same financial ecosystem because the sophistication of the phone in somebody’s hand should not determine whether financial services can reach them.

Not technology asking ordinary people to change how they live. Technology paying attention to how they already live.

I found myself reading this fictional household and thinking:

We built for you.

Because financial inclusion is not an app. It is whether the financial system is useful in the reality of your life.

Perhaps progress should not only be measured by how resilient people remain, but also by how much unnecessary resilience our systems stop demanding from them.

There was another reason yesterday mattered. Allen’s ambition is not to leave Wings From Ashes on a launch table. She wants to take the book into schools, into conversations, into mentorship and into young lives that are still being written.

I deeply applaud her for that. Writing the book is one act of courage. Deciding that what you have written must travel far enough to become useful to somebody else is another.

A young reader may now see a mistake before making it, recognise a danger before meeting it or imagine a future before arriving there.

A launch is one afternoon. A legacy is what the story keeps doing after the room has emptied.

Perhaps that is why her work connected so deeply with my own decision to write.

I wrote Grateful for Year One: Nothing Wasted because after my first year carrying the full weight of a company, I realised I had accumulated something more valuable than a list of wins. I had mistakes. Decisions I would make differently. Questions I now knew to ask. People who had carried me. Systems that had failed. Systems that had saved us. And lessons I had paid for in pressure.

And I thought:

if I leave all of that inside my head, then perhaps I have wasted part of the experience.

Allen documented. I documented. And I want to dare more of us to do the same.

Please do not wait until you are fifty, famous or decorated with titles before deciding your life has taught you something worth passing on. If you are eighteen, you have eighteen years of observation. You know something about being eighteen in this world that I cannot know anymore. You have failed at something, changed your mind about something, watched your family navigate something, or seen something in your school, community, industry or generation that somebody else may need language for.

Write it. Record it. Teach it. Start the channel. Keep the journal. Tell the story.

You do not have to be an expert on the whole world. Be a faithful witness to what your corner of the world has taught you. Somebody behind you may be about to pay full price for a lesson you have already paid for.

We will always need resilience. Life will always contain fires we cannot prevent. But maybe we do not need to stop celebrating resilience.

Maybe we need to stop designing lives that require quite so much of it.

Tell the story. Build the system. Open the door. Take the book into the school. Leave the signpost.

Less ashes. More wings.

Because perhaps the best evidence that we grew wings is that somebody behind us has less ash to rise from.

From My Notebook

These notebook entries are part of an ongoing body of original work exploring technology, leadership, faith, entrepreneurship and the work of building in Africa.

Some of these reflections also sit within the wider body of thought behind my forthcoming book, Grateful for Year One: Nothing Wasted, a founder’s blueprint for surviving the beginning, stewarding the vision and building to last.

Still building. Still learning. Still grateful.

Until next week’s notebook,
Rowena Turinawe

© 2026 Rowena Turinawe. All rights reserved.

Somewhere, in the middle of an otherwise ordinary day, a craftsman stops what he is doing. Not because he has run out of work, but because he cannot get an image out of his mind.

It is a bag. Not one he has seen before, but one that does not exist yet.

He can already picture its shape, the way the leather should fold without collapsing, the curve of the handle, the weight of the clasp, even a pocket positioned exactly where the person carrying it will instinctively reach. He sees details nobody else can see because, for now, nobody else can see the bag at all.

So he reaches for a pencil. The first sketch is wrong. He turns the page and draws again, changing the handle, moving the clasp, adjusting the proportions.

Eventually, he begins choosing materials. He touches the leather, bends it, studies the grain, rejects one piece and keeps another. He measures, cuts, stitches, unpicks and starts again. One section is redone because something is slightly wrong. Not obviously wrong. Not wrong enough for most people to complain, but wrong enough that the maker knows.

So he fixes it.

That is workmanship.

The woman who eventually receives the bag will see the finished product, but she will not see the discarded sketches or know which material was rejected. She will not see the seam that was opened and stitched again, or know how many years it took for the hands holding that needle to become that steady.

She sees what was made. She cannot fully see what the maker put into making it.

Eventually, the craftsman reaches the point where there is nothing more to add. He sets the bag down, steps back and recognises what nobody else could see at the beginning.

Yes. This is what I saw.

Then comes one final act. He marks it.

A name. A symbol. A signature. A small declaration that says:

THIS IS MY WORK. I STAND BEHIND IT.

And somehow, that mark changes the way we see the object, because the mark tells us something about the maker, and the maker tells us something about the work.

I have been thinking about workmanship differently lately because I have been thinking about value, particularly about how easily we confuse the value of what we produce with the value of the person producing it.

I think founders and business owners are especially vulnerable to this.

A customer refuses your price and suddenly it feels as though they have rejected more than the product. Sales are slow and somewhere in the back of your mind another question begins: Maybe what I am building is not valuable. If you are not careful, that quietly becomes: Maybe I am not as good as I thought.

Someone else launches after you and seems to grow faster. Their stand is busier. Their content receives more attention. Their business raises money. Their book sells. Their career moves. They are invited into the room you were hoping to enter.

And without meaning to, you begin using the market’s response to your work as evidence about you.

Christians can do this too, only sometimes with more spiritual language.

Maybe I am not called. Maybe I heard God wrong. Maybe if this were really from Him, it would be working by now. Maybe somebody else’s visible fruit means God placed more in them than He placed in me. Maybe wanting to grow this business, charge properly, become visible or make money means I have become too ambitious.

I have been wondering whether we sometimes collapse several completely different questions into one:

Is this product valuable?

Is this business working?

Am I stewarding it well?

And am I valuable?

Those are not the same question.

The market should absolutely test the first three. Customers are allowed to reject my price. A business model can be wrong. A product can need improvement. My execution can be poor. My stewardship can be weak. The numbers can tell me uncomfortable truths.

But somewhere in all of that, I need to know where the market’s jurisdiction ends.

Because if I do not, I can spend my life allowing sales, titles, applause, relationships, income and other people’s progress to renegotiate my worth every few months.

The market is qualified to evaluate what I make. It is not qualified to tell me what the Maker of me says I am worth.

And that takes me back to God.

Scripture does not begin my story with what I produced. Long before there is any conversation about achievement, usefulness, success or failure, there is a Maker.

Paul writes in Ephesians 1:4:

“He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world...”

Ephesians 1:4, NKJV

There was something before my performance. Before I could demonstrate whether I was clever enough, disciplined enough, useful enough or successful enough, I was already known by God.

Psalm 139 makes the language even more intimate:

“For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made...”
Psalm 139:13–14, NKJV

Formed. Covered. Made.

That language does not sound accidental.

It does not mean everything about me is automatically good or should remain unchanged. Sin distorts. Pain leaves marks. Habits can become unhealthy. Character needs formation. Some things require healing, surrender, discipline and transformation.

But neither should I casually call every difference a defect simply because it does not fit somebody else’s preference.

The sensitivity that once felt inconvenient may become compassion. The questioning mind may mature into discernment. Stubbornness, properly formed, may become endurance. Intensity, properly directed, may become conviction. An experience I would never have chosen may leave behind wisdom I could not have acquired cheaply.

Some workmanship becomes obvious only when the work finally meets the assignment it was being prepared to carry.

What I can immediately see about myself does not tell me everything the Maker put into making me.

But there is another part of creation that has stayed with me even more.

Genesis 1:26 says:

“Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness...”
Genesis 1:26, NKJV

And the next verse continues:

“So God created man in His own image...”
Genesis 1:27, NKJV

The Maker put His mark on His work.

His image. His likeness.

And suddenly I am back in the workshop, looking at the craftsman placing his signature on the thing he made.

THIS IS MY WORK. I STAND BEHIND IT.

Before anybody gave me a surname, before a company gave me a title, before a man chose me, before a customer paid me, before the marketplace decided whether my work was impressive, before anybody called me successful and before anybody had the opportunity to reject me, the Maker had already put His mark on me.

That changes the value conversation.

Because we are very good at looking at people and asking what they earn, what they drive, what company they own, who chose them, how influential they are, how many people follow them and what rooms they can enter.

Those things may tell us something about a person’s circumstances, opportunities, decisions or achievements. They cannot tell us her ultimate worth.

Perhaps there is a more fundamental question:

Who made her?

A product can be priced from the outside. A human being cannot be properly valued only by what she produces, earns, owns, attracts or achieves.

There is a deeper claim on her identity.

She bears the mark of her Maker.

And yet Scripture does not leave me standing there admiring the fact that I was made. This is where the idea becomes much more demanding.

Ephesians 2:10 says:

“For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works...”
Ephesians 2:10, NKJV

The Greek word translated workmanship is poiēma.

Something made. Workmanship. The product of creative action.

And suddenly I see the whole workshop again: the thought before the product, the care inside the making, the intentional design, the details only the maker could see, the mark placed on the finished work.

And Scripture says:

We are His workmanship.

Not self-made. Not accidental. Not waiting for the marketplace to tell us what we are worth.

But Ephesians does not stop at workmanship. We are created for good works.

The workmanship has an assignment.

That matters because great workmanship is not merely beautiful. It is purposeful. A precision tool is shaped around what it must do. A commissioned piece is designed around what it must carry. Certain details only begin to make sense when you understand the intended use.

Perhaps that is true of us too.

Jesus says in Matthew 5:16:

“Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.”
Matthew 5:16, NKJV

I do not think good works are confined to activity that looks obviously religious. In business, good work can look like creating something genuinely useful, solving a real problem, treating people with dignity, keeping our word, bringing order where there was confusion, building with integrity, paying people fairly, serving customers well, using influence responsibly and doing excellent work when mediocre work would probably still pass.

The work is visible, but it should carry traces of the One who made us.

And perhaps this is where the distinction I have been trying to make finally becomes clear:

My value is settled by the Maker. My stewardship is measurable.

Those are not competing ideas. In fact, I think separating them makes both more serious.

I do not have to produce excellent work in order to become valuable. But because I am God’s workmanship, what I do with what He has placed in me matters enormously.

Being God’s workmanship is not protection from feedback. My business can still be badly run. My strategy can still be wrong. My product can still need work. A customer can still rightly say no. I can waste an opportunity, misuse a gift, avoid discipline or fail to develop what has been entrusted to me.

The market therefore has a legitimate role. It can test whether what I am producing is useful, whether somebody will pay for it, whether my ideas work outside my own head, whether I am stewarding resources well and whether the work stands up to scrutiny.

Good stewardship should make me willing to listen to that feedback, to improve, to learn, to change and to become better at carrying what I have been given.

But I still need to know where the market’s jurisdiction ends.

The market may assess the work. It may price the product. It may reward or reject the offer. It may even tell me that what I have built is simply not good enough yet.

What it cannot do is renegotiate the worth of the person standing behind it.

That conversation began somewhere else, with Someone else, before the market ever had an opinion.

The market may price what I sell. It does not get to price me.

And once that question is settled, perhaps the more important one remains.

If I am His workmanship, created for good works, what should come out of God’s workmanship?

From My Notebook

TThese notebook entries are part of an ongoing body of original work exploring technology, leadership, faith, entrepreneurship and the work of building in Africa.

Some of these reflections also sit within the wider body of thought behind my forthcoming book, Grateful for Year One: Nothing Wasted, a founder’s blueprint for surviving the beginning, stewarding the vision and building to last.

Still building. Still learning. Still grateful.

Until next week’s notebook,
Rowena Turinawe

© 2026 Rowena Turinawe. All rights reserved.

Imagine reviewing an entire journey from Kampala to Mbarara based only on the pothole that nearly rearranged your internal organs.

You ignore the kilometres of good road, the beautiful scenery, the safe arrival and the hot roadside gonja that restored your faith in the journey. Then you announce, “The entire trip was terrible.” “I am tired of this country!”

The pothole was real. Your spine can testify. But it was not the whole journey.

Or imagine feeling completely unloved because everyone forgot your birthday once, after more than thirty years of celebrating you, spoiling you, calling you, buying you gifts and making you feel special.

One forgotten birthday enters the record, and suddenly the conclusion becomes, “Nobody loves me.”

The pain is real. The disappointment is real. But what happened to the previous thirty years?

They did not become false because this year hurt.

Facts do not become false because we forget them. They only become absent from our accounting.

Our memories can be vivid without always being fair. They remember what hurt, what failed, what embarrassed us and what did not happen as expected. Meanwhile, years of kindness, provision and evidence can quietly disappear from the report.

Memory is an excellent archivist, but a terrible accountant.

Perhaps that is why David had to tell himself:

“Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits.”
Psalm 103:2

Why would David have to say that?

Surely, when God has been good to you, you remember. Surely answered prayers, unexpected provision and moments of rescue leave such a permanent mark that no reminder is necessary.

Except they do not.

We forget the prayer we once begged God to answer after the answer becomes part of our ordinary life. We forget how desperately we wanted the opportunity we now complain about. We forget the people who carried us once we become strong enough to stand by ourselves. We forget the doors that opened because we are still staring at the one that did not.

Perhaps David understood something deeply human.

Modern psychology gives us language for it. Researchers describe the negativity bias, our tendency to give greater attention and weight to negative experiences than positive ones. The brain remembers danger because danger may need to be avoided again. It remembers criticism, especially when it comes from someone whose opinion matters deeply to us. It remembers the failure, the rejection, the delayed promotion, the investor who said no and the customer we worked hard to win and still lost.

This does not mean that one unpleasant comment erases twenty good years. But one painful performance review from someone we deeply respect can occupy our thoughts longer than months of steady encouragement. A succession of difficult meetings can make an otherwise productive season feel like complete failure. One unresolved problem can become so loud that it begins to narrate everything else.

Behavioural economists have also found that losses and gains do not carry equal psychological weight. Losing something often hurts more intensely than gaining something of the same value feels good.

Then there is another compelling way of understanding the mind: the brain as a prediction machine. It is constantly trying to anticipate what might happen again, what it should prepare for and what could go wrong next.

This may explain why an embarrassing moment from years ago can suddenly report for duty at two in the morning, fully dressed and carrying supporting documents. Apparently, your brain believes the matter remains open for review.

Pain is treated as useful information. It is stored for future reference because remembering it may help us avoid danger.

That may help us survive. But survival is not always the same thing as truth.

Left to itself, the mind can produce an incomplete report.

Suddenly, David’s words sound less poetic and more practical.

Forget not.

David was not the only person in Scripture confronted with the problem of forgetfulness. Israel repeatedly forgot the God who delivered, provided for and led them. In Deuteronomy, they were warned not to forget the Lord when they entered prosperity:

“When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the Lord your God for the good land He has given you. Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God.”
Deuteronomy 8:10–11

Apparently, hardship is not the only threat to memory. Comfort can also make us forgetful.

Jesus also drew His disciples back to evidence. After feeding thousands of people, when they later became anxious about bread, He asked them:

“When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?”
Mark 8:19

He asked how many loaves they had started with, how many people had eaten and how many baskets were collected.

He made them count.

Ten lepers were healed, but only one returned to give thanks. Jesus noticed the missing nine:

“Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine?”
Luke 17:17

The numbers did not reconcile.

Even the genealogies of Scripture insist on recounting names, generations and stories that might otherwise have been forgotten. Again and again, the Bible confronts the same human tendency: we experience God’s faithfulness, and then we forget.

The Bible is not merely saying, “Be grateful.”

It is saying, “Remember accurately.”

This may be why gratitude requires discipline. It is not necessarily our natural setting. Remembering takes effort. Counting takes effort. Accounting takes effort.

There is a reason organisations employ trained professionals to prepare financial reports. Accurate accounting is not always exciting. It requires attention, evidence, discipline and the willingness to examine everything, rather than only what is convenient or immediately visible.

Perhaps gratitude requires the same faithfulness.

Gratitude tells the whole truth

We think gratitude means looking on the bright side. Always seeing the glass as half full. I do not think it does.

I think gratitude is the discipline of telling the whole truth.

The whole truth includes the disappointments, yes. But it also includes the unexpected kindness, the lessons hidden inside failure, the people who stayed, the doors that quietly opened and the strength you did not know you were building.

Gratitude is not pretending life was easier than it was. It is refusing to file an incomplete report.

Optimism asks, “What is the best that could happen?” Pessimism asks, “What is the worst that could happen?” Gratitude asks, “What actually happened?”

And answering that question requires honest accounting.

Imagine a finance team preparing annual accounts that listed only expenses: salaries, rent, taxes, software, fuel, professional fees and operating losses. They present the report to shareholders and declare, “The company has nothing.”

Someone would immediately ask about the customers, contracts, intellectual property, systems, infrastructure, reputation, employees, relationships, future opportunities and lessons the business paid dearly to learn.

Those were assets too.

A report that counted every expense but ignored every asset would not be called conservative or realistic. It would be called inaccurate.

Now imagine a doctor examining only your cholesterol. She ignores your blood pressure, heart, lungs, blood sugar, kidney function and every other test before announcing, “Overall, your entire body is failing.”

You would probably ask for another doctor. Not because cholesterol is irrelevant, but because one measurement cannot provide the entire diagnosis.

Incomplete reporting produces inaccurate conclusions.

Yet many of us review our lives this way. The year brought growth, relationships, protection, wisdom, opportunity, provision and grace. But one important plan failed. One prayer remains unanswered. One relationship ended. One opportunity went to someone else. One season took longer than expected.

So we conclude, “It was all bad.”

Was it? Or was the report incomplete?

Two balance sheets

The older I get, the more I realise that most of us do not evaluate our lives objectively. We evaluate them emotionally. Whatever hurts most can become the headline. Whatever remains unresolved can become the whole report. Whatever is still missing can overshadow everything already present.

That is why I believe every leader should keep two balance sheets.

One for money. One for grace.

We are meticulous with financial accounting. We count revenue, expenses, assets, liabilities, cash flow, margins, targets and variances.

Yet when we assess our lives, we often use only one metric:

What is still missing?

What if we kept another balance sheet?

People who believed in us. Prayers that were answered. Lessons that saved us. Doors we did not deserve. Protection we only recognised later. Mistakes that became mentors. Strength developed through difficulty. Wisdom purchased by experience. Relationships that outlived the season that introduced them.

That is accurate accounting too.

Gratitude is remembering what the human mind forgets. It is not the denial of pain. It is the refusal to let pain become the only witness.

It is not pretending that every outcome was good. It is recognising that even difficult seasons may have produced something valuable.

A company can miss its revenue target and still build extraordinary infrastructure. It can record lower profits while strengthening governance. It can grow more slowly than expected while earning trust that may compound for years. It can endure expensive mistakes while gaining lessons that prevent even more expensive mistakes later.

A good leader knows that one number, taken in isolation, rarely tells the whole story.

Perhaps we owe our lives the same discipline.

Perhaps gratitude is not simply a feeling of thankfulness. Perhaps it is an act of accurate witness.

God is glorified when we tell the truth about His faithfulness.

Not when we exaggerate. Not when we pretend nothing hurt. Not when we rename disappointment as enjoyment. God is glorified when we remember faithfully and say, “This was painful, but God carried me. This door closed, but another opened. This plan failed, but it taught me something I needed to learn. This season cost me, but it also formed me. This was not what I expected, but I was not abandoned.”

The opposite of gratitude may not only be ingratitude.

It may be forgetfulness.

Before you conclude this season, do your accounting. Count everything, not just what you lost, but what you gained, what you learned and who you became.

The numbers may surprise you.

Take a notebook, a sheet of paper or the notes app on your phone and draw two columns. In the first, write what this season cost you. Do not minimise it. Tell the truth.

In the second, write what the season gave you. Count the people, the protection, the lessons, the provision, the growth, the strength, the answered prayers, the quiet mercies and the grace you nearly forgot to record.

Then pause and read the whole report.

Give thanks. Not because everything was perfect. Not because nothing hurt. Not because you received everything you wanted.

Give thanks because it was not all bad. God was present. Grace was working. You are still here. Something was being built, even in the breaking.

Gratitude is not optimism. It is accurate accounting.

And accurate accounting begins when we remember the whole story.

From My Notebook

These notebook entries are part of an ongoing body of original work exploring technology, leadership, faith, entrepreneurship and the work of building in Africa.

Still building. Still learning. Still grateful.

Until next week’s notebook,

Rowena Turinawe

© 2026 Rowena Turinawe. All rights reserved.

I was reading through one of my old notebooks when I came across two questions I had scribbled during a conversation about digital lending.

Must I integrate with the CRB databases?

How else can I determine who deserves credit? Build a scoring engine? Integrate?

At the time, they probably sounded like product questions.

The kind of questions you write down beside API requirements, compliance obligations, credit models and system architecture.

Then, during a conversation with a close friend this past weekend, I realised something.

When I wrote those questions down, I wasn’t really asking an engineering question.

I was asking a human one.

How do we, as banks and other financial institutions, determine whether someone is worthy of credit?

And what if we are judging them wrongly?

Am I worthy of credit?

Suppose I apply for a loan today.

The lender will probably ask for my NIN, the National Identification Number issued to every registered Ugandan.

My NIN helps confirm that I am who I say I am.

It identifies me.

It does not define me.

It does not tell you whether I keep my word, whether I honour my obligations or whether I repay people when I say I will.

The lender may also look at my income, my existing loans, my bank account activity, my collateral and my apparent ability to repay.

A digital lender may go even further.

They may analyse my transaction patterns, how regularly money enters my account, how much I spend, where I spend it, the consistency of my income and perhaps even behaviour connected to my device or location.

All of that may help answer one question.

Can she pay?

But it may not fully answer the other.

Will she pay?

Those are not the same question.

Someone may earn a good salary and consistently avoid their obligations.

Another person may earn irregularly but protect their name fiercely. They pay the landlord when they promised. They clear their electricity bill. They repay friends. They honour instalments. They communicate when something goes wrong.

They may not have titled land, a payslip or a long formal banking history, but they have spent years demonstrating character.

Where is that history recorded?

Where can I find the complete financial reputation of an ordinary Ugandan?

When a lender searches for me, are they finding me, or only the small part of me that has passed through a formal financial institution?

Because I am not my NIN.

I am my reputation.

My NIN tells you who I am.

It does not tell you whether I am worthy of trust.

The five Cs and the missing picture

Creditworthiness has traditionally been assessed through the five Cs of credit.

Character considers whether you have a history of keeping your word and repaying what you owe. Capacity considers whether your income and cash flow are sufficient to meet repayments. Capital looks at what you have invested, saved or built yourself. Collateral looks at what the lender can recover if the loan is not repaid. Conditions consider the purpose of the loan, its terms and the wider economic environment that may affect repayment.

Together, the five Cs are supposed to create a complete picture of a borrower.

The problem is that we often measure only the easiest things to see.

We can estimate your income.

We can value your land.

We can confirm your employer.

We can retrieve your borrowing history.

But can we measure your integrity?

How do we record the thousands of small promises you have kept over the years?

How do we recognise that a market trader with irregular income may be more dependable than someone with a permanent salary?

In practice, many lending decisions still seem heavily anchored around two things: what you appear able to pay and what can be recovered from you when you do not.

Capacity and collateral.

But the ability to pay is not the same as the willingness to pay.

When the picture is incomplete, genuinely good borrowers can look risky.

A small business may have no audited financial statements but may have paid suppliers reliably for seven years.

A young professional may never have taken a bank loan but may have paid rent, school fees, utilities, insurance and mobile-based credit without missing a deadline.

A market trader may not own land but may turn over money every day and settle every informal obligation on time.

All of that is credit behaviour.

Credit is not only the money I receive from a bank.

It is also the trust extended to me by a landlord, supplier, utility company, SACCO, mobile lender, employer, friend or business partner on the understanding that I will fulfil an obligation later.

But much of that reputation is invisible.

So we make lending decisions using fragments.

Because lenders cannot clearly separate the disciplined borrower from the reckless one, everybody pays for the uncertainty.

The disciplined borrower quietly pays the price for the undisciplined one.

Higher interest rates.

More collateral.

Shorter repayment periods.

More documents.

More suspicion.

We price the borrower we cannot fully see.

This is why the new direction matters

Uganda has taken important steps to expand credit information sharing beyond traditional banks and supervised financial institutions.

The amendment of the Credit Reference Bureau Regulations to allow non-financial institutions and other accredited credit providers to submit information is a significant development.

I must applaud the Bank of Uganda for this.

It acknowledges something our financial system has ignored for too long.

A person’s real credit behaviour may exist outside a bank.

It may exist in a SACCO, a utility account, a mobile loan, a supplier relationship, a rental agreement or a digital payment history.

The more legitimate institutions that contribute accurate and complete information, the closer we get to seeing the real borrower rather than a thin institutional record.

There is also work underway around a Central Data Hub, which could create a more standardised way for institutions to submit and access credit-related information.

If we pull this off well, it may become one of the most brilliant things the Bank of Uganda has done.

But regulation alone will not create the outcome we need.

What is the incentive for institutions to report?

Reporting is not free.

Someone must integrate systems, clean records, obtain consent, resolve disputes, correct errors, protect customer information and maintain ongoing submissions.

The incentive cannot simply be that institutions have been asked to report.

The value exchange must be clear.

When I contribute quality data, what does the ecosystem return to me?

Can it help me assess risk more accurately?

Can it give me a meaningful rating or score?

Can it help me distinguish between someone who has never borrowed and someone who has borrowed repeatedly and defaulted?

Can it help me lend responsibly to someone the traditional system would otherwise reject?

This is where I believe Credit Reference Bureaus must continue to evolve.

They cannot simply collect records and return reports.

They must help lenders understand what the information actually means.

A report gives me data.

A score helps me rank risk.

A strong risk assessment helps me make a decision.

We need Credit Reference Bureaus to evolve from repositories into intelligence platforms.

If I submit my data, they should be able to return enough value for me to become one of the institutions doing actual credit scoring, rather than simply checking whether a name appears in a database.

But then another thought crossed my mind

We currently have only three licensed Credit Reference Bureaus.

Is that enough competition?

Are we building another concentrated system in an industry already defined by silos?

Our industry has spent years trying to solve fragmentation.

Banks operate in silos.

Most wallets compete instead of connecting.

Payment systems do not always speak to one another.

Data remains trapped in separate institutions.

So as we build better credit infrastructure, are we solving fragmentation, or simply creating another place where information becomes concentrated?

Are we creating another monopoly situation?

Or am I thinking about it the wrong way?

Perhaps the answer is not simply more bureaus.

Perhaps it is better interoperability.

Perhaps the real value is not the database at all.

Perhaps it is the intelligence built on top of it.

Perhaps the Central Data Hub helps solve this.

Perhaps the CRBs become the intelligence layer, translating information into scores, risk assessments and useful ratings while the underlying ecosystem becomes more connected.

I do not know the full answer yet.

My notebook did not have one either.

But then I reached the uncomfortable part

Imagine that we pull it off.

Your rent history is visible.

Your utility payments are visible.

Your mobile loans are visible.

Your supplier obligations are visible.

Your SACCO repayments are visible.

Your business collections and transaction patterns are visible.

Before I lend you money, even as a friend, I can estimate the likelihood that you will repay me.

Would I even ask to see your score?

That sounds efficient.

Perhaps even revolutionary.

But as I solve one problem, am I creating another?

What happens when one difficult season becomes a permanent digital label?

What happens when a medical emergency, a delayed salary or a failed business causes someone to miss several payments?

Does the system understand context, or does it simply remember default?

Who corrects inaccurate information?

Who decides which behaviour counts?

Can a person rebuild their financial reputation?

Will alternative data expand opportunity, or simply create new ways to exclude people?

Could location data, spending patterns or phone behaviour introduce biases that have little to do with character?

Could the same system designed to finally see the invisible borrower become a system that watches them too closely?

Technology does this often.

It gives us the power to answer a question before we have fully considered whether we should.

So, am I worthy?

I believe the future of credit must move beyond asking whether I own land, receive a salary or already have access to formal finance.

It should ask whether I have demonstrated responsibility.

It should recognise the small business that pays suppliers.

The tenant who pays rent.

The woman who faithfully clears her SACCO loan.

The young person whose financial life exists mainly on mobile money.

The borrower whose income is irregular but whose character is not.

That requires more data.

It requires integrated digital payment systems that can speak to one another instead of operating in silos.

It requires robust but futuristic regulators and policymakers who are willing to build not only for today’s financial system, but for the one we hope to have ten years from now.

It requires institutions that are willing to share information responsibly rather than protect it competitively.

But it also requires trust, consent, transparency, strong consumer protection and a genuine path for people to correct errors and rebuild their financial reputation.

More data without better governance simply creates more ways to judge people unfairly.

The purpose of technology should not be to find more sophisticated ways to reject people.

It should help us see them more truthfully.

Until then, every lender must carry a little humility.

The person in front of us may not be unworthy of credit.

We may simply be looking at an incomplete picture.

Perhaps the greatest risk is not lending to the wrong person.

It is failing to recognise the right one.

From My Notebook

These notebook entries are part of an ongoing body of original work exploring technology, leadership, faith, entrepreneurship and building in Africa.

Still building. Still learning. Still grateful.

Until next week’s notebook,

Rowena Turinawe

© 2026 Rowena Turinawe. All rights reserved.

There are very few Ugandan phrases as universally understood as:

“Real time or Ugandan time?”

There is another.

“I’m almost there.”

The fascinating thing is that almost nobody asks the obvious follow-up questions. Have you left? Are you still in the shower? Are you still deciding what to wear? Or are you simply buying yourself another ten minutes?

Because somehow, we all know what it means.

And if we are being completely honest, it rarely means what it says.

“I’m almost there” might mean you are ten minutes away. It might mean you have only just left home. It might mean you have just remembered that the meeting exists. It might even mean you are hoping I will not call again.

Somehow, we have all agreed to participate in this little national theatre.

We know the script, the ending, and somehow, we keep performing it.

Then comes my personal favourite:

“Banange, I am so sorry. The road was blocked. You know these roads of ours.”

Or:

“There were no boda bodas, so I had to wait.”

Then someone joins a meeting twenty minutes late and says:

“Sorry, I was calling the other people to join.”

Especially in Christian circles, where we are our brother’s keeper, apparently even when keeping our brother means everybody else must wait.

Before almost every church meeting, work meeting, fellowship, committee session or practice, somebody notices the empty chairs and immediately asks:

“Have you called so-and-so? What have they said?”

The meeting has been on the calendar for weeks. A reminder was sent yesterday. Another one went out that morning. Yet somehow, the people who honoured the time must spend the first ten minutes locating the people who did not.

We punish punctuality by making it wait for lateness, and then we call it grace.

Somewhere along the way, we became so comfortable with lateness that we invented our own timezone.

Ugandan Time.

Not East Africa Time.

Ugandan Time.

Think about that. We are literally asking whether the time we agreed upon is actually the time we agreed upon.

Church starts at 10:00 a.m., so people aim for 10:30. The wedding invitation says 2:00 p.m., so guests begin preparing at 2:00 p.m. The programme says the guest of honour will arrive at 11:00, and nobody is surprised when they appear after midday.

The MC then announces: “We are just waiting for a few important people.”

Which is a fascinating way of telling everyone who respected the invitation that their time is apparently less important.

Even at work, we have perfected it. A deadline quietly becomes tomorrow. Tomorrow becomes next week.

Next week becomes: “We are still following up with so-and-so.”

Or: “We had not yet heard back from them.”

Then somewhere in the middle of all that, an email arrives ending with:

“We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused.”

The inconvenience.

Not the broken commitment. Not the missed deadline. Not the three departments now working overtime because one person delayed their part. Not the designer working late, quality assurance being pushed into the night, or the leader reviewing documents at 11:00 p.m.

Just the inconvenience.

Have you also noticed that the people who are always late are almost never surprised that they are late?

They are calm. You are the one watching the clock. They are cheerful. You are rearranging the agenda. They answer the phone as though nothing unusual has happened.

“Yeees, I’m almost there.”

Not, “I am sorry for keeping everyone waiting.”

Not, “Thank you for your patience.”

Just information.

As though the lateness happened to them like rain, traffic or gravity. As though they had nothing to do with it.

As a leader, I think about time far more than I ever expected to. Not because I enjoy policing adults. I actually hate it.

At one point, I introduced a rule for our Executive Committee. If you arrived more than fifteen minutes late for my meetings, you paid UGX 10,000. The wider team paid UGX 5,000.

People laughed. Some complained. Some improved. Some did not.

Eventually, I got tired of collecting the money, because I realised I was not trying to raise revenue. I was trying to build culture.

And culture is much harder to change than calendars.

There is another question I ask that always seems to offend people:

“What time will this meeting end?”

The moment you ask, people look at you as though you have slapped someone. Or interrupted the Holy Spirit.

“We are not sure.”

“Let us meet and see.”

“We shall know as we go.”

I am not asking because I am in a hurry or because I disregard what you want to discuss. I am asking because I have another meeting, because I promised someone else my time, or simply because I would like to plan my day.

Could it be that failing to respect time is not only about starting late? Could it also be about refusing to define it?

Every meeting that unnecessarily overruns quietly steals time from something else: someone’s family, someone’s deadline, someone’s rest, or another promise they made in good faith.

This week, while looking through one of my notebooks, I found a page with this verse written at the top:

“Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Psalm 90:12

Underneath it, I had scribbled four words: Chronos. Kairos. Time. Stewardship.

I had forgotten when I wrote those notes until I heard them again while sitting in the back chairs at The City Church, Luzira.

Something was being taught about Chronos and Kairos, and suddenly my own handwriting came back to me. The notes had been sitting quietly in my notebook, waiting for life to help me understand them.

Chronos is ordinary, measurable time. Minutes, hours, days, calendars, reminders and deadlines. It is Monday morning, the meeting at nine, the report due on Friday, the school pickup and the doctor’s appointment. It is the ordinary time that quietly becomes our lives.

Kairos is different.

Kairos is the appointed moment. Some would call it God-appointed time. It is the opportunity, the open door, the interview where the person with authority to make the decision is actually in the room, the investment made at the moment the market is ready, or the conversation that changes everything.

It is the season where preparation meets possibility, and possibility meets purpose. The possibility of meeting your divine appointment.

And a question began following me around:

What if our greatest opportunities are not only determined by God’s timing, but also by how faithfully we steward our own?

Not because God cannot open doors. He absolutely can. Not because He is waiting to love us, bless us or remember us.

But because opportunities still require prepared people.

There is something fascinating about Psalm 90.

Moses, who wrote this Psalm, was leading the Israelites out of generations of slavery and towards a promise they had waited a very long time to see. He carried the responsibility of leading an entire people through the wilderness, managing their fear, frustration, rebellion and uncertainty while still trying to remain faithful to God’s direction.

He had a mission. He had a destination. He knew the journey mattered, and he knew time was not unlimited.

Yet he did not ask God for more days. He did not ask for a shorter route. He did not ask for an easier wilderness.

He prayed: “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

Notice the connection. Not more time….Wisdom.

Almost as though Moses understood that the real answer was not necessarily more hours, fewer obstacles or a faster journey. It was becoming wise enough to steward the time already given.

And then another thought hit me.

Maybe we spend too much time blaming the wrong things.

We blame the economy. We blame difficult sectors.

“This sector is already saturated.”

“Everyone is farming.”

“Everyone is in fintech.”

“Everyone is selling clothes online.”

“That is why business is slow.”

We blame the people who did not support us. We blame delayed opportunities. Sometimes we even spend whole nights binding demons.

Yet I wonder: what if the thing quietly stealing from us is sitting inside today’s calendar?

Not always.

But sometimes. Sometimes it is not another prayer meeting we need. Sometimes it is not another motivational video or networking event.

Sometimes it is simply learning to honour time.

Before you throw stones, I am writing this to myself first.

I am naturally optimistic. Dangerously optimistic. My close friends will tell you that I genuinely believe I can fit five more meetings into the day, one more call, another conversation, one more favour and one more email.

Then traffic reminds me that physics still exists.

So no, I am not writing as the woman who has mastered time. I am writing as someone who is beginning to suspect that my relationship with time deserves far more attention than I have given it.

Because time is not just something we spend.

Time is a seed.

Every hour gets planted somewhere: into preparation, distraction, prayer, excuses, learning, discipline, procrastination, relationships, healing, resentment or growth.

Every hour becomes a seed, and every seed eventually produces fruit.

Which makes me wonder how much of the fruit I am experiencing today grew from seeds I planted months ago, or even years ago.

What if today’s harvest is not random? What if it is simply yesterday’s calendar made visible?

That thought is terrifying, but it is also strangely hopeful. Because if time is a seed, then I can plant differently tomorrow.

Maybe your book is not waiting for inspiration. Maybe it is waiting for protected time.

Maybe your marriage does not need one dramatic holiday. Maybe it needs thirty uninterrupted minutes that you keep giving away to “one last email.”

Maybe your body is not asking for another Monday diet. Maybe it is asking for enough sleep because poor planning keeps turning into late nights.

Not every problem is a time problem. Life is far more complicated than that.

But I wonder how many problems quietly become worse because we refuse to honour Chronos.

The more I think about this, the more I believe that our poor timekeeping, especially as Ugandans, is not really about punctuality.

Punctuality is simply the symptom.

The real conversation is about stewardship and discipline. It is about becoming the kind of person whose ordinary habits can carry extraordinary responsibility.

Because if I cannot consistently steward ten minutes, why do I assume I will suddenly steward ten thousand customers, ten million shillings, ten thousand employees, a platform, influence or success?

Perhaps greatness is not built in Kairos at all.

Perhaps greatness is quietly rehearsed inside Chronos, through every ordinary day, every ordinary meeting and every ordinary promise kept.

At times like this, I admire orchestras.

Dozens of musicians bring different instruments, personalities and responsibilities into one room. There is one conductor, one score and one moment in which everything must come together.

Imagine if the violinist casually decided to arrive three minutes after everyone else, or if the percussionist thought, “They can begin without me.”

It would not simply be late. It would disturb the music.

Harmony depends on people entering at the right time, not only playing the right notes.

Time is never only about time. It is about whether people can depend on you.

Someone’s opportunity may be sitting behind your deadline. Someone’s rest may depend on your preparation. Someone’s promotion may rely on the report you keep delaying. Someone’s customer experience may depend on the system you were supposed to test. Someone’s family may be waiting because you turned your poor planning into their overtime.

I do not exist in a vacuum. Neither do you.

I think one of the greatest threats to my future is treating ordinary time as though it does not matter. Thinking I can always catch up tomorrow, that another late night will fix poor planning, or that another apology will repair another broken commitment.

Forgetting that whenever I fail to honour time, someone else may be paying a price they did not have to pay.

Thinking “I’m almost there” is harmless.

Maybe it is not.

The more I think about that phrase, the more I wonder whether it has become a description of many of our lives.

Almost finished writing the book.

Almost disciplined.

Almost healthy.

Almost ready.

Almost consistent.

Perhaps that is what our toxic relationship with time eventually costs us. Not just minutes, but moments.

We may keep disrespecting Chronos and then wonder why we never seem to arrive at the Kairos opportunities we have been praying for. We may spend years saying, “I’m almost there,” without noticing that almost has become a permanent address.

Patterns build culture. Not policies or speeches. Patterns.

If the leader constantly arrives late, the team learns lateness. If deadlines move every week, urgency disappears. If commitments are optional, accountability becomes impossible.

Culture is simply repeated behaviour that everybody has quietly agreed to tolerate.

Which makes me ask: What have I normalised that I should have challenged?

Not only in my organisation. In my own life.

This week, instead of asking only how I can make my teams honour time, I am asking what kind of person my own calendar is creating.

📓 From the notebook

These are the questions I am carrying with me:

• Where am I casually wasting time and calling it “life”?

• Which emergencies are simply poor planning wearing a disguise?

• Who keeps paying the price for my lack of preparation?

• What have I normalised that I should have challenged?

• If God entrusted me with my next Kairos tomorrow, would my current Chronos convince Him I was ready?

Perhaps wisdom does not begin when we finally have more time. Perhaps it begins when we finally honour the time already in our hands.

So the next time somebody asks: “Real time or Ugandan time?”

Maybe our answer should simply be: “Time.”

Because if we keep laughing at the habit that quietly steals our ordinary hours, we may spend the rest of our lives saying what we have always said...

“I’m almost there.”

Still building.
Still learning.
Still grateful.

Until next week,
Rowena

One page may have a strategy note. The next may have a prayer. Then a follow-up list. Then a question I was too afraid to say out loud. Then a scripture. Then a sentence that makes no sense until months later.

My notebooks are not neat archives of wisdom. They are where I think, wrestle, pray, plan, doubt, prepare, process, and occasionally remind myself to call people back (still a valid need).

This week, while going through one of them, I found this page.

That note stopped me.

Because before this week, I found myself asking a very strange question repeatedly: Can I push yet?

I imagine it’s the question an expecting mother asks after carrying, waiting, and feeling enough pressure when every part of her says, surely this is the moment.

For the men watching, this is when you need to stay calm, quietly hold the bag, offer encouragement, and absolutely avoid saying, “calm down.”

But anyone who understands childbirth knows that pushing too early can be dangerous.

Before active pushing, the body has to be ready for the baby to pass through. The baby also needs to descend properly into position, and the contractions must be working at the right rhythm.

If pushing starts too early, before the body is ready, it can exhaust the mother, increase swelling, and make the whole process harder.

So yes, the baby may be coming. The pressure may be real. The pain may be intense. The signs may all be there. But timing still matters. Readiness still matters.

I am building a global fintech headquartered in Uganda, and we have been carrying something for more than ten months: an agent network.

If you have never worked in digital payments, an agent network might sound like a technical term casually tossed around in strategy meetings. It is not.

For a payments company, an agent network is not just a distribution channel. It is physical trust. It is where customers can put money into wallets, withdraw cash, ask for help, activate services, and experience the business beyond the screen.

It is where merchants can receive support closer to where they actually operate.It shows partners that your business is not just a digital idea on a dashboard, but something that can reach real people in real places. It is not a nice-to-have, it is part of the promise.

So in the African market, digital does not remove the need for physical presence. Sometimes it makes it even more important.

For more than 10 months, we carried this work. We wanted to create at least 22,000 agent points.

So we built all the tech we needed.

We integrated with our partners and tested.

We went through change approval processes.

We discussed customer journeys and support procedures.

We went over commercials and pricing models.

We even developed artwork because we genuinely believed we had completed the final system test and were anticipating going live.

And then we waited: a week, then weeks, then a month, then months. At some point, all we kept asking was, “Can we push yet?”

Honestly, we were tired.

Not because nothing was happening, but because so much had been happening quietly. Our to-do lists were filling up, tasks were being ticked off, but still no visible results.

I imagine this might be why God uses the idea of delayed childbirth to remind His people that He is faithful. That He can be trusted. He does not bring something to the point of birth only to abandon it there.

And that is what it felt like for us. The baby had grown. The body had stretched. The bags were packed. Everyone knew it was time. But still, we were waiting.

But this week, after so much waiting, something shifted.

WE PUSHED!!!!

Almost overnight, the company gained access to well over the agent footprint we had planned for, not on one network, but on two. It felt almost like discovering, at delivery, that you are having twins!

But even in the joy, I knew this was not the time to become careless. Waiting is not only a test of patience. It is a season of preparation.

And when the thing you have waited for finally begins to open, you quickly discover whether you used the waiting well.

If this had happened months ago, before the manuals, before the testing, before the commercials, before the customer journeys, before the partner alignment, before the internal conversations, before the repeated back-and-forth, it might have looked like a breakthrough but behaved like chaos.

Sometimes delays protect us so we are fully ready for what comes next.

Sometimes God is not only preparing the thing for you. He is preparing you for the thing.

And that is the part I do not want to waste.

Because the danger of waiting too long is that you can start to despair. You can think that nothing is happening. You can become cynical, tired, irritated, discouraged, or even numb.

The benefit of waiting, if you choose to embrace it, is preparation for what is ahead.

Waiting gives you time to build slowly. To test properly. To ask better questions. To document. To train. To notice gaps. To strengthen people. To prepare your own heart. To stop romanticising the opportunity and start preparing for the responsibility.

Despair says, “Nothing is happening.”

Preparation says, “Something is coming. Get ready.”

Despair wastes the lessons that could be learned from waiting.

Preparation makes waiting productive.

What I am writing in the margins

Here are five things I am learning to prepare for while I wait, especially as the thing I have been waiting for finally begins to open.

1. Ask: “If this opened tomorrow, what would break?”

This question is rude, but helpful.

• Would the team know what to do?

• Would the system hold?

• Would support be ready?

• Would the customer experience make sense?

• Would my calendar survive?

• Would my emotions survive?

Sometimes we say we are waiting for a breakthrough, but we have not prepared for the weight of it.

2. Build the boring things early

• Manuals.

• Checklists.

• Policies.

• Trackers.

• Processes.

• Commercial models.

• Escalation paths.

• Roles and responsibilities.

• Customer journeys.

None of these is exciting. But when the opportunity opens, they become protection.

The boring things you build in private often become the things that save you in public.

3. Plan beyond the announcement

It is easy to prepare for the big moment and forget the day after. So I ask:

• What must happen in the first 24 hours?

• What must be stable in 7 days?

• What must we review in 30 days?

• Who needs to know what?

• What risks are we watching?

• What would “working well” actually look like?

A baby does not only need to be born. A baby must be cared for.

4. Write things down before pressure steals your memory

This is why notebooks matter to me. Pressure makes even clear people forget things.

So I write down risks, questions, decisions, prayers, lessons, warnings, follow-ups, and things I do not want to repeat.

5. Prepare yourself, not just the opportunity

This is the one I am sitting with most deeply. Because something this significant opening almost overnight can spin you if you are not grounded.

You can panic. You can start doubting yourself again. You can celebrate so loudly that you miss the risks. You can overlook blind spots in your leadership. You can become so relieved that you stop paying attention.

So for me, preparation is not only operational. It is spiritual. It means going back to the One who made it happen.

The Bible says that if anyone lacks wisdom, they should ask God, who gives generously. So now it is time to ask. Time to plan with God. Time to search the Scriptures. Time to ask for direction. Time to ask for wisdom. (James 1:5, NKJV).

This week, when I found that note in my notebook, I smiled again. I read it differently.

God has not only been working on the thing.

He has been using the waiting time to work on us.

And maybe that is the mercy I almost missed. The waiting was not for despair. The waiting was preparation.

📓 “God will finish. He will see me through and out.”

Lesson: Waiting is not for despair. Waiting is for preparation.

Question: If the thing you are waiting for opened tomorrow, what would you need to prepare today so you do not panic when it is time to push?

Until next week, keep building.

I had forgotten I even wrote it. I don’t remember what I was going through at the time, but after one year of leading, I think I finally understand what God was teaching me before I even knew I’d need the lesson.

At the top of the page, I had written one question: Who can I trust with my reputation?

Underneath it, I scribbled a few possibilities: Partners? Staff? God? Ultimately... is it me?

Starting something has a funny way of making you obsess over your name. When you start a business, your name suddenly becomes your currency. It becomes your résumé, your guarantee, your collateral.

You hope your name opens doors. You hope partners trust it. You hope customers believe it. You hope it earns you grace while you’re still figuring things out. You hope it gets you that first meeting, that first investor, that first client, that first “yes.”

And if you’ve ever battled imposter syndrome, you’ll know the quiet fear hiding underneath all of that: What if my name isn’t enough?

Then leadership begins, and suddenly your name isn’t only attached to the wins. It’s attached to everything: every delayed activation, every failed product test, every customer complaint, every missed deadline, every employee mistake, every partner who under-delivers, every promise that takes longer than expected.

The strange thing about leadership is that your reputation starts walking around wearing other people’s shoes. Your team carries it. Your partners carry it. Your suppliers carry it. The people you recommend carry it. Sometimes even people you’ve never met influence how others perceive your name.

So you begin asking difficult questions. Who can I trust? My partners? My team? My own judgment? The consultant? Google? AI?

Where can I confidently lean and say, “This won’t embarrass me. I won’t regret this. My name is safe here.”

The truth is, leadership demands trust. Not blind trust. Wise trust. We choose good people. We build good systems. We seek wise counsel. We verify. And then...

we let go.

Then I noticed something.

My notebook question was: Who can I trust with my reputation?

But perhaps God had been gently rewriting the question.

Maybe it had become: Whose reputation are you really protecting?

That question stopped me. Because if the answer is mine, I’ll live anxiously. Every criticism will shake me. Every failure will define me. Every mistake will become an identity crisis.

But if the answer is His, I’ll live faithfully. Not carelessly. Not irresponsibly. Faithfully.

That’s not an excuse to neglect wisdom or accountability. We still choose trustworthy partners. We still build good systems. We still own our mistakes. But beneath all of that is a deeper confidence: we are called to reflect His character, not carry the impossible burden of controlling every outcome.

Then I came across these words in Ezekiel:

“Therefore say to the house of Israel, ‘Thus says the Lord GOD: It is not for your sake... that I am about to act, but for My holy name’s sake...’”
— Ezekiel 36:22

I read it again. Then again.

God wasn’t saying He didn’t love His people. He was saying something even bigger. He was reminding them that His actions flow from His unwavering commitment to His own holy Name.

And suddenly, I saw my first year differently.

Maybe this wasn’t ultimately about proving myself. Maybe it wasn’t about building my reputation. Maybe it wasn’t even about becoming CEO.

Perhaps it was about discovering why nothing is wasted.

Not because every experience feels good.

Not because every delay makes sense.

But because God is relentlessly committed to the glory of His Name.

Every delay. Every closed door. Every recovery. Every promotion. Every lesson. Every victory.

Not ultimately for us.

But so that, through ordinary people and impossible stories...

His Name is lifted high.

That is not just a leadership lesson. That is a life philosophy.

Because this isn’t really about reputation.

It’s about identity.

It’s about the burden every leader carries — the burden of trying to protect a name.

And then discovering...

God never asked us to build our reputations.

He asked us to honor His.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to build a good name. Scripture even tells us that “a good name is to be chosen rather than great riches.” And it is.

Integrity matters. Character matters. Trust matters.

But I’ve come to realize that the greatest burden wasn’t building a reputation. It was believing I had to protect it by myself.

Then I remembered something.

God has a Name too.

And throughout Scripture, He repeatedly says He acts for His Name’s sake.

His promises. His character. His faithfulness. His reputation has stood the test of eternity.

So perhaps the safest place for my reputation is in the hands of the One who has always been faithful to His own.

Perhaps the greatest freedom in leadership is realizing that I don’t have to spend my life making a name for myself. My calling is to live in such a way that His Name is seen through mine.

Because if MY reputation is entrusted to the One who will never compromise His own, I can lead with courage instead of fear.

And I can’t think of anyone I’d rather trust with my reputation than the God who has spent eternity being faithful to His.

Not because life was perfect.

Actually, because it wasn’t.

I thought it would be a simple exercise. A few pages. A nice reminder to focus on the good things. Maybe something I could revisit on difficult days.

One hundred reasons.

That’s all.

What I didn’t know was that the list would refuse to stop.

By the time I reached number 100, I wasn’t done.

Neither was God.

So I kept writing.

Page after page.

Memory after memory.

Lesson after lesson.

Today, that little gratitude exercise sits somewhere around eighty pages long.

Not because I suddenly became more disciplined.

But because gratitude started showing me things I had missed.

It showed me that some of the moments I had labelled as setbacks were actually preparation. Some of the delays were protection. Some of the disappointments were redirection. And some of the seasons I wanted erased from my story had become evidence of God’s faithfulness.

Over a year ago, my life looked very different.

I had taken eight months of sick leave, and somewhere in that season I realised I was standing at a crossroads.

Either I would fully surrender, slow down, and focus on getting well, or I would keep pretending I was fine and quietly bury myself alive.

So I resigned.

No grand plan.

No perfect backup strategy.

Just a deep knowing that my health, my mind, and my life needed my full attention.

The days that followed were slower than I was used to.

I ate chocolate.

I coloured in books.

I read my Bible.

I tried every DIY project I could find.

I studied and found new topics to obsess over.

I waited for family members who had their own lives to come home.

I scrolled through LinkedIn far more than I should have, wondering what everyone else was building while I was simply trying to breathe again.

It felt as though the world had continued moving while I had stepped aside.

Then, slowly, I began consulting.

It was work I knew I could do, but at a pace my body and mind could carry. It gave me room to think, to heal, to earn, to serve, and to rebuild without pretending I was fully back.

Then, boom.

Life accelerated.

In May this year, I completed one year as CEO to a STARTUP!!!!!

One year of decisions.

One year of responsibility.

One year of pressure, stretching, learning, leading, failing, building, praying, celebrating, and trying again.

The irony isn’t lost on me.

I went from spending a year learning how to slow down to stepping into one of the fastest seasons of my life.

And somewhere along the way, I realised something profound: God had wasted nothing.

Not the corporate experience.

Not the disappointments.

Not the waiting.

Not the recovery.

Not the prayers.

Not even the things I would never have chosen for myself.

Every lesson I needed for this season had been planted in a previous one.

As I wrote my gratitude list, I began noticing a pattern. Many of the things I was thanking God for were things I once asked Him to remove. Many of the lessons I treasure today arrived disguised as problems. Many of the blessings I celebrate now began as situations I didn’t understand.

The older I get, the less impressed I am by people who appear to have everything together.

Life has taught me that most of us are figuring things out as we go.

Most of us are walking by faith more than certainty.

Most of us are one prayer, one opportunity, one act of courage away from a completely different chapter.

Including me.

So if you find yourself in a season that feels slow, uncertain, or even wasted, this is your reminder:

Keep the list.

Write the gratitude.

Document the lessons.

Pay attention.

One day you may discover that the chapter you were trying to survive was actually preparing you for the chapter you’re living now.

And if my eighty pages have taught me anything, it is this:

Nothing is wasted.

By the time I reached number 100, I wasn’t done. Neither was God.

P.S. What started as 100 reasons to give thanks eventually became something much bigger than I expected.

A friend shared a TikTok clip that bothered me. Not because it was entirely false, but because it touched a nerve.

The clip started with something that made me pause: in China, minors under 18 have reportedly faced restrictions from participating in organized religious activities, including religious teaching, religious schools, youth camps, and some forms of organized religious exposure.

And this is not only a TikTok argument. Governments around the world clearly understand that childhood formation matters. Tajikistan signed a law banning most children under 18 from attending regular Friday prayers in mosques. Uzbekistan recently introduced penalties for parents who allow children under 18 to receive “illegal” religious education. And even outside religion, countries are now restricting children’s access to social media.

Now whether you agree with these approaches or not, stop for a second and ask yourself: why would nations care so much about what gets programmed into the mind of a child? Because they understand one thing:

Whoever shapes a child’s mind, shapes the future.

So the speaker’s argument was basically this: religion in Africa has trained people to obey, fear, give blindly, pray, and wait, while places like China train children to build, engineer, compete, strategize, and solve problems. The strongest accusation was that African children are taught to “suspend critical thought in favor of belief,” and that this produces adults who are “spiritually committed, but economically powerless.”

And honestly, that bothered me.

Not because I agree that God is the problem. I do not. But because I think we must have the courage to admit that something in that critique touched a real wound. Many people have met a version of God that made them smaller.

But when I look at Scripture, I do not see a God who makes people smaller. I see a God who gives people wisdom & strategies to become great.

Which made me wonder, “have we taught people a small God?”

Not the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Not the God we see throughout scripture. Not the God who gives wisdom. Not the God who creates systems. Not the God who gives architectural plans, military strategies, governance models, economic foresight, leadership structures, legal wisdom, diplomatic timing, and kingdom assignment.

But a reduced God.

A God of escape, but not execution. A God of comfort, but not capacity. A God of miracles, but not mastery. A God of prayer, but not planning. A God of church attendance, but not nation-building. A God of “wait on Me,” but never “build with Me.”

And if that is the God people have met, then maybe we should not be surprised when they think keeping children away from religion is a solution.

You see, God is not allergic to thinking or strategy.

If Joseph could strategize with God in economics, why have we made financial literacy look worldly? If Nehemiah could strategize with God in construction and national rebuilding, why do we treat project management like it is separate from faith? If Esther could strategize with God in politics and timing, why do we shame people for being discerning? If Daniel could serve God in Babylon with wisdom and excellence, why have we taught believers to fear systems instead of influencing them? If Paul could use law, culture, travel routes, language, and audience analysis, why do we pretend strategy is manipulation?

Where did we get this version of faith that makes planning look suspicious? Where did we get this idea that to be spiritual is to be unstructured? Where did we get this version of God who blesses chaos, baptizes laziness, and calls lack of preparation “trust”?

As Christians, maybe one of the first corrections we must make, wherever we have influence, is this:

We must stop teaching fear of God as fear of thought, fear of structure, fear of strategy, or fear of greatness.

God does not create dull minds. He renews minds. He does not ask people to stop thinking. He asks them to think differently.

So we must teach that wisdom is spiritual. Not worldly. Wisdom is one of the clearest marks of God’s work in a person, and without it, people can be sincere but easily manipulated.

We must teach children to think with God, not against God. The answer is not to remove God so children can think. It is to show them that God created them to think, build, ask, study, test, solve, and lead.

We must stop glorifying ignorance as humility. Ignorance is not humility, poor preparation is not surrender, and refusing to learn is not faith.

We must restore the theology of work. Work is assignment, witness, service, nation-building, problem-solving, and stewardship, not just where Christians go to earn money before returning to church.

We must separate obedience from blind compliance. Biblical obedience is not mindless compliance. Mary questioned, David inquired, Gideon asked for confirmation, the Bereans examined Scripture, and Paul reasoned in public spaces.

We have to show them the God we actually see in Scripture: not a small God who makes people passive, afraid, and dependent, but the God who gives wisdom, trains leaders, builds nations, orders steps, reveals patterns, gives strategy, does His part, and then calls us to do ours.

Maybe that is the better story we owe the next generation. That we owe the world.

Not a faith that teaches them to stop thinking, but a faith that teaches them to think with God.

Bible References

1. Joseph: Genesis 41:25–36; Genesis 41:37–49; Genesis 41:53–57.

2. Nehemiah: Nehemiah 1:4–11; Nehemiah 2:1–8; Nehemiah 2:11–18; Nehemiah 4:13–18.

3. Esther: Esther 4:13–17; Esther 5:1–8; Esther 7:1–10.

4. Daniel: Daniel 1:8–20; Daniel 2:17–23; Daniel 6:1–5.

5. Paul: Acts 16:6–10; Acts 17:16–34; Acts 18:1–4; Acts 22:25–29; Acts 25:10–12; 1 Corinthians 9:19–23.

6. Noah: Genesis 6:13–22; Genesis 7:1–5.

7. Moses: Exodus 25:8–9; Exodus 25:40; Exodus 18:13–26.

8. Joshua: Joshua 6:1–20; Joshua 8:1–29.

9. David: 1 Samuel 30:7–8; 2 Samuel 5:17–25.

10. The apostles: Acts 6:1–7.

11. Mary: Luke 1:34–38.

12. Gideon: Judges 6:36–40; Judges 7:1–25.

13. The Bereans: Acts 17:10–12.

I can’t casually learn anything.

One video becomes seventeen tabs.
One question becomes a full investigation.
I disappear into topics like I’m researching for a PhD I never enrolled in.

It starts small.
A clip. A headline. A random thought I can’t shake.

Then something clicks. And suddenly I need to understand it. Not just know it, understand it. So I follow it.

One link leads to another.
Another opens a thread.
The thread references something else.

And now I’m three hours in, somewhere between science, psychology, spirituality, brain rot, and a slightly unhinged theory that somehow… makes sense.

At some point, I look at the time and ask myself: “Wait… how did I get here?”

I lead a team where half the time I’m wondering if they’re distracted… until I realize they’re just deep in something.

Then I go home, and kids are the same. Different apps. Same behaviour.

And then there’s me…tabs open, theories half-formed, convinced I need to “just understand one more thing.”

So maybe I’m not just observing this thing. Maybe I am this thing.

A millennial trying to understand Gen Z while raising Gen Alpha, and somehow realizing we may all be living in different digital worlds but falling into the same kinds of holes.

Different apps. Different language. Different attention spans.

Same curiosity. Same disappearance. Same “wait, how did I get here?”

Let me be honest, this isn’t always a superpower.

Sometimes, things get half-finished.
Time disappears without permission.
You carry a lot of “almost understanding”, like you were close to something, but didn’t quite land it.

Sometimes I come out of a rabbit hole sharper.

Sometimes I come out overstimulated.

Sometimes I come out with one useful insight, twelve useless facts, and no memory of what I was supposed to be doing before I started.

But still… there is something about the pull that feels worth paying attention to.

Because not everything grabs me. Some things pass by and I feel nothing. But some things stop me.

They make me pause. Search. Read. Watch. Question. Save. Send to someone. Open another tab. And maybe that matters.

Maybe the things that repeatedly pull us in are not always distractions. Maybe sometimes they are signals.

So to the rabbit hole minds… the tab hoarders, the late-night researchers, the accidental experts, the people who know too much about one random topic for absolutely no formal reason…

I see you.

Maybe the goal isn’t to stop falling into rabbit holes.

Maybe it’s to notice what keeps pulling you in…
because that might be pointing you to something you actually care about.

I’m still trying to figure out why I cared enough to spend hours watching Michael Jackson conspiracy theories… and what it means that, for a moment, it all made sense.

There is a picture I keep thinking about.

I am sitting on a statue, reading Emotional Intelligence 2.0, still trying to figure out why my boss thought I needed it, and later understanding that I really did.

I laugh when I look at it.

Not because I think I am now some impossibly polished version of myself. No. I laugh because that picture tells the truth about that season. I was still being built.

That book was not random, by the way. It was one of the first books my boss ever gave me. Which should tell you a lot.

When I was at NITA-U, my boss of what became six years of massive growth, Peter Kahiigi, did something many leaders claim to believe in, but far fewer actually practice: He trusted me before I was ready.

He threw me into rooms I had no business feeling comfortable in.

Important meetings. Panels. Media interviews. Conversations way above my confidence level. Work that stretched me before I felt ready to carry it.

And no, it did not always feel inspiring in the moment. Sometimes I would die inside every time I heard the words, “Rowena will represent us.” Because I was never fully sure I could pull off the task ahead of me.

I remember a time I was trying to explain the word infrastructure in Luganda on the 8pm local news, wrestling but refusing to die on live television.

And that part of my story, strangely enough, is what seemed to hit the emotions of most of the 300+ students, from high school, university, and fresh graduates, that I spoke to at the recent CIO-CXO Forum launch.

Because I think they understood the deeper point.

I studied. I certified. I kept showing up. I said yes. And somebody senior trusted me before I looked finished.

I shared my story of how I began my journey with no clear career coordinates, swinging from networks to systems administration to service management, until I found myself smack in the middle of leading a team managing over 300 information systems and services across government.

And every time the room changed, I had to change too.

So I humbled myself and studied.
I certified, because effort needs evidence.
I kept learning, because you do not need to know everything, but you cannot afford to know nothing. (And I do not mean learning only in the classroom. I mean learning anywhere growth is required.)

I kept showing up, even when it was uncomfortable.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, I also had leaders who trusted me before I looked finished.

That matters more than many people realize.

That formula matters.

Because what people often call confidence is sometimes just repeated exposure.

We like to tell neat stories about successful people. We say they were brilliant. Strategic. Disciplined. Clear. Visionary.

Sometimes that is true.

But often what we are actually looking at is a person who survived enough exposure to become fluent in rooms that once intimidated them.

And that matters, because many young people are not failing because they are lazy. They are not even failing because they lack potential.

Sometimes they are simply too far from the right room, the right language, the right standard, the right opportunity, or the right person.

Too far from the person who might have said, “You go. You handle it.”

And this is where leadership becomes more serious than many people make it sound.

Because when leaders are deciding whether to take a chance on someone, the questions are not only: Can this person learn? Can they listen? Can they recover? Can they think? Can they take correction?

There are harder questions too. Will they fail? Might they embarrass me? Will they get the job done perfectly? Probably not.

But that is not always the point.

Sometimes the point is a leader still choosing to take a chance on you anyway.

And no, this is not a story about Peter. I would need a whole book for that.

This is a testimony about what good leadership looks like. But it is also bigger than leadership alone.

It is about us being part of fixing the pipeline. It is about being a bridge between leaders and aspiring youth who genuinely do not yet know what their future holds.

And that is why this part matters so much to me:

We are here because Uganda cannot afford a comfortable contradiction where employers say talent is missing while talent says opportunity is missing.

We are here because the country is young.
Because the pressure is real.
Because the pipeline needs repair.
Because skills, exposure, mentorship, and courage must meet in one room.

So when I spoke to those young people, that was really the heart of my charge.

Not just that they should study.
Not just that they should certify.
Not just that they should become useful and find problems to solve.

But that leaders, too, have a responsibility.

We cannot keep complaining about the pipeline if we are unwilling to help build it.

We cannot keep saying talent is missing if we are unwilling to train it, expose it, mentor it, and trust it.

Many of us in leadership were not handed polished beginnings either.

We were developed. We were corrected. We were stretched. We were trusted.

And if leaders like Peter had not existed in my life, I would still be waiting to “feel ready.”

When I think about what I was really trying to say that morning, it comes down to this:

I know what it feels like to feel unready.
I know what it feels like to stand in rooms that expose the gap between your current self and the self you hope to become one day.

But I also know what happens when you stay in the room.

When you study.
When you keep saying yes.
When you allow yourself to be stretched.
When somebody senior trusts you enough to let you carry more than you thought you could.

That is how people grow wide.

And that is what I wanted both the CIOs/CXOs and the young students, many of whom are uncertain about where they fit in the pipeline, whether in employment, vocational studies, business, or something else entirely, to understand:

We both have a part to play.

For young people: Skill up, show up and keep showing up. You will stand before great men one day.

For leaders: Ready people are rare. But stretchable people are everywhere. Find them. Build them. Back them.

Last month, I had the privilege of hosting a series at The City Church called Kingdom Finances.

I went into it excited, curious, and ready to learn everything I could about money. I expected conversations about getting money, keeping money, multiplying money, savings, investments, and better financial decisions. And yes, the series covered all of that. What surprised me most was this:

It was not really a series about money.
It was a series about maturity.
About who you become when money enters your hands.

That hit me deeply because there is a version of financial struggle that has very little to do with how much money you make.

It is the quiet panic of watching money arrive and disappear, with almost nothing meaningful to show for it. For many people, that story is familiar.

You work hard.
You pray.
You receive money.
You settle a few urgent things.
You respond to a few emergencies.
You make a few “I deserve this” purchases.
You help a few people because you genuinely have a “good heart.”
Then suddenly, the money is gone.

And the most painful part is not even the empty account. It is the uncomfortable realization that money did come. It just did not stay. And even when it stayed briefly, it did not grow.

Because the real issue is not always access. It is not always, “How do I make more?” Sometimes the harder and more honest question is: Who am I becoming when money enters my hands?

Many of us do not have a money problem first.
We have a formation problem.

We want increase without discipline.
We want harvest without seed.
We want inheritance without stewardship.
We want overflow without restraint.

That is why this series felt so biblical and so confronting. Scripture does not only ask how money enters your hands. It keeps pressing on a deeper issue: what has your heart become? Jesus Himself warned that money competes for the place only God should hold in our hearts. (Matthew 6:24)

Money is not just a resource issue.
It is a lordship issue.
A heart issue.
A discipleship issue.

For me, that became personal in an unexpected way.

I have always planned to retire by 40. But as that age draws closer, I am realizing something uncomfortable: I was not only meant to prepare financially for retirement. I was meant to prepare myself for it.

Because I cannot prepare my finances to support the same version of me if that version of me is still undisciplined, still impulsive, still without purpose, still not fully surrendered to God’s wisdom.

James 1:23–25 reminds us that the Word of God is like a mirror, it does not just inform us. And that is where the Word of God now confronts, and then comforts me. It exposes me honestly, showing me who I really am, but it doesn’t leave me there; it calls me to stay with it and respond.

In verse 25, it then comforts me and says, “whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it, not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do.” That is the invitation; not just to see, but to change. And maybe that is the harder financial question: when the Word shows me who I am, will I walk away unchanged… or will I actually do something about it?

So as I plan for the future, the question is no longer just whether I am building enough. The question is: As I look into the mirror of God’s Word, have I been preparing the version of me that my future money will meet?

If this stirred something in you, I’d encourage you to go and watch the full Kingdom Finances series on The City Church Luzira YouTube page.

Not just to learn about money, but to confront who you need to become.

A few weeks ago, I wrote The Passion Myth in Startup Culture, where I argued something I still deeply believe: passion is powerful, but it is not stable fuel.

It can start things. It can energize vision. It can animate teams. But it is not dependable enough to sustain serious work over time, because it fluctuates.

That was the thesis of the first article. But it left me with another question, one I said I wanted to sit with: If passion is not enough, then what actually sustains a builder?

Or more honestly: What happens when passion doesn’t return?

What happens when curiosity stays quiet, purpose feels unclear, and the work still matters? And harder still, what happens when you still have to lead in that condition?

That is where the conversation gets harder, because most people can admit that passion comes and goes. Fewer people talk honestly about what it means when it stays quiet for longer than expected, long enough to unsettle you, long enough to make you wonder whether you are tired, burnt out, misaligned, or simply no longer where you once were.

For leaders, that tension is heavier still. Leadership culture quietly suggests that those carrying vision should also be constantly energized by it, clear, inspired, certain, fully connected. But is that how serious building works? In my own journey, I have found that it isn’t so.

You do not always get to lead from overflow. That is important to say plainly:

leading without emotional intensity is not fake leadership.

And before we make that season too philosophical, it is also important to recognize that sometimes, you are simply tired. Decision-tired, emotionally overextended, mentally crowded, operationally buried. Fatigue of any kind, emotional, mental, physical, is dangerous because it can imitate misalignment. It can make meaningful work feel dull, strategic work feel heavy, and important work feel emotionally dead.

So before one concludes, maybe I have lost the assignment, it is worth asking a less dramatic question: Am I depleted, or am I truly disconnected? Those are not the same thing.

But as one looks for those answers, they still have to lead. And in those moments, what often carries a builder is not passion, but responsibility, stewardship, discipline, conviction, and decisions made in a previous season when things were clearer.

After sitting with that question for a while, I think what carries a builder in low seasons is this: Structure, clarity of mission, and reverence.

1. Borrow structure when you cannot borrow motivation.

When passion is low and clarity is thin, what often saves you is not a breakthrough. It is structure, rhythm, routine, intentional scaffolding. The things that feel boring in high-energy seasons become life-saving in low-energy ones, because if internal fire is low, external support matters more.

Sometimes clarity does not come first. Structure comes first. Then clarity returns inside it.

And structure does not always have to mean something grand or corporate. Sometimes it looks like keeping the regular meetings, still doing the Monday check-in, still asking the right questions, still reviewing what matters, still saying good morning to the people you lead, still pausing to mark progress, still ending the month with gratitude, still protecting the small rhythms that keep a team human.

It is choosing to keep showing up in ways that preserve order, trust, warmth, and momentum until your internal world catches up again.

2. Lead from mission clarity, even when you lack emotional clarity.

If you are a founder or leader, there is another uncomfortable truth: your team cannot be built around your nervous system.

A healthy team should not require constant emotional performance from its leader in order to function well. It should have distributed ownership, distributed thinking, distributed energy. Some teams need more of your clarity than your charisma, more of your steadiness than your spark.

A leader in a quiet or unclear season does not need to have every long-term answer. But they do need to know what they can responsibly anchor the team to: what matters now, what the priorities are, what standards still hold, what success looks like in this season.

Because a team can survive a leader having a low season. What they struggle to survive is inconsistency and unpredictability leaking into execution.

Sometimes leadership is simply this: I may not have every long-term answer right now, but I know what we need to execute well in this season. And often, that is enough.

3. Sometimes the real fuel is reverence.

And for me, I need to say this plainly: reverence for God.

Because if I am honest, there are seasons where what carries me is not passion, and not even curiosity. It is the fact that I know my life is not self-authored.

God is the source of my purpose. He is the one who gives us power to work, to build, to create, to generate, to steward. He is the one who gives meaning to assignment.

So sometimes, what carries me is not “feeling inspired.” It is reverence.

Reverence for God. Reverence for the opportunity. Reverence for the responsibility. Reverence for the fact that if He has entrusted something to me, then I do not have the luxury of treating it carelessly just because I feel tired.

And that is where stewardship becomes more than a productivity concept. It becomes spiritual posture.

Because some seasons are not for excitement. Some are for faithfulness, steadiness, obedience, refinement, and quiet endurance.

That too is worship.
That too is reverence.
That too is leadership.

So what if passion doesn’t return right away? Then perhaps the work is not to panic, abandon everything prematurely, or shame yourself for being in a quieter season.

Perhaps the work is to ask better questions. What is exhausting me? What have I been carrying too long? What structure do I need right now? What am I still deeply convinced about? What has God actually entrusted to me in this season, whether I feel electrified by it or not?

And perhaps the deepest question of all is this:

What if this is not the death of the fire, but the transition into a steadier one?

Not the loud kind. Not the youthful kind. Not the adrenaline-fuelled kind. The kind that can actually carry weight. The kind that does not only start things, but sustains them.

If the first article was about why passion is not enough, then perhaps this is the harder half of the thesis: what carries us when it fades.

I do not think I have the final answer yet. But this feels truer.

And for now, that is enough.

And honestly, I understand why. Life today can feel like one giant group project where everyone else somehow got the memo before you. Somebody is already building a startup, somebody is in grad school, somebody is working remotely for a company in Europe, and somebody else has a skincare line, a podcast, and deeply suspicious levels of confidence on LinkedIn. If you are not careful, you can start interpreting everybody else’s movement as evidence that you are somehow late, lost, or delayed.

That is really what I wanted to interrupt on Sunday night. Because I think many people are not actually behind. I think many people are simply being introduced to life in real time, and there is a difference.

One of the biggest lies modern life tells people is that if you have not “figured it out” by now, then something must be wrong with you. But I have come to think that a lot of what people call failure is actually underexposure. Underexposure to the right rooms, the right language, the right standards, the right possibilities, and the right people. Because the truth is, you cannot become what you have never seen up close.

Sometimes what feels like confusion is simply unfamiliarity.

And unfamiliarity is not inadequacy. It just means you are seeing something bigger, newer, or more demanding than what your current environment prepared you for. That does not mean it is not for you. It might just mean you are early.

And being early can feel a lot like being behind, because your appetite is often ahead of your evidence. You can feel where your life is trying to go before your results have caught up. You can sense that there is more in you before your CV, bank account, title, or environment can prove it. If you misunderstand that season, you can become discouraged by a phase that was actually meant to stretch you, not punish you.

That is why exposure matters so much. A conversation can save you two years. A mentor can save you five mistakes. The right room can change your self-concept. Sometimes your life does not need a miracle. It needs proximity.

But exposure alone is not enough. Eventually, you have to do something with what you have seen. And this is where many talented people get stuck. They are intelligent, promising, and capable, but the world does not reward potential. It rewards usefulness.

That line sounds harsh until you realize it is actually liberating, because usefulness is buildable. You can become more useful. You can learn better, think more clearly, communicate more sharply, solve more real problems, and become someone people can trust with responsibility. That matters far more than simply sounding impressive. There is a real difference between being impressive in conversation and being useful in execution.

I also wanted to say something plainly about technology. It is not a separate industry anymore. It is the environment. Whether you are in business, finance, media, leadership, education, communications, or ministry, the world you are entering is already changing. The future will keep moving, and so must you.

Too many people still treat technology like a niche interest for “tech people.” It is not. It is the environment we now work, build, communicate, and compete inside. Which is why I said this as directly as I could: technology is not replacing you. Irrelevance is. And that is not a fear statement. It is an invitation to learn the tools, use the tools, stay awake, and stay teachable.

At the same time, I also wanted to make room for something equally important: you are a human being, not a productivity app. A lot of ambitious people are trying to become extraordinary while quietly burning themselves to the ground. Yes, speed matters. But unmanaged speed will break you. Not everything in your life should be optimized, rushed, or monetized. Some things still need prayer, recovery, peace, and room to breathe. If you build your future at the expense of your humanity, eventually the thing you are building starts owning you.

So if I had to say it one more time, I would say it like this: you are not behind. You are not too late. You are not disqualified because someone else started earlier. You are early. Early in your exposure, early in your becoming, early in your leadership, early in your contribution, and early in your understanding of what your life may still become.

And that is not a weakness. It is a gift. Because it means there is still time to learn, move, and become more useful, more grounded, more adaptive, and more whole.

Maybe that is what I really wanted people to leave with on Sunday night. Not pressure. Perspective. Because sometimes the thing that changes your life is not more effort. It is a better interpretation of the season you are in.

You are early. Now behave like it

.

I expected funny answers. And I got them.

But the more I sat with them, the more they stopped feeling random.

They started to feel like clues

.

And what struck me most was not just how clever or specific they were. It was how deeply I could relate to almost all of them.

Because if you have to say the same thing sixteen times a day, that phrase is no longer just language.

It is evidence.

Evidence of what is not flowing naturally.
Evidence of where you are compensating.
Evidence of where stewardship has quietly turned into strain.

On the surface, the answers sounded outward-facing. They seemed to be about people, systems, delays, pressure, expectations, teams, commitment to service, movement.

But the longer I sat with them, the more I realised they were actually revealing something inward.

They were exposing what work feels like on the inside.

The frustration.
The repetition.
The emotional labor.
The quiet fear.
The pressure to keep things moving.
The burden of trying to hold things together.

That is what stayed with me.

Because the repeated phrase is often doing more than moving work forward.

It is revealing what a person is carrying.
What their environment keeps demanding from them.
What they are trying to prevent.
And sometimes, what part of them is being soothed each time they say it.

When someone keeps saying “please please please,” it may be more than politeness. It may be care, fatigue, or the instinct to soften urgency so they can still be received.

When someone keeps saying “culture,” they may be naming more than values. They may be pointing to drift, inconsistency, or behavior they can feel but cannot yet shift fast enough.

When someone keeps saying “MANDATE” or “Musumba (Pastor) said,” they may be doing more than reinforcing conviction. They may be compensating for weak ownership, where borrowed authority moves people faster than internal buy-in.

And when I keep asking, “Who is going live today?” maybe I’m not only checking coordination. Maybe I’m also guarding against silence, inconsistency, and loss of momentum.

That is why this little experiment stayed with me.

Because the sentence you repeat all day is rarely just a habit.

It is often a clue.

To what you are stewarding.
To what your system is lacking.
To what you fear might happen if you stop saying it.
And sometimes, to the part of you that is quietly trying to validate itself through the work.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised this is bigger than a funny status prompt.

It can actually be a mirror.

Because if your work requires you to say the same sentence over and over again, that sentence may be telling on more than your role. It may be revealing a weak system. Or poor ownership. Or a culture issue. Or a leadership burden that has become too concentrated in one person.

And sometimes, it may be revealing you.

Your fear.
Your exhaustion.
Your need for reassurance.
Your habit of over-carrying.
Your need to feel useful, needed, or in control.
Your quiet hope that all this effort is amounting to something.

That is where stewardship and self-awareness meet.

A good steward pays attention to patterns.

Not just metrics.
Not just outputs.
Not just meetings.
Patterns.

Because what keeps repeating is usually trying to teach you something.

About the team.
About the culture.
About the product.
About the process.
About your leadership.
About your heart.

At the end of the day, maybe we all want the same thing.

We want to win.
We want our teams to win.
We want the thing we are building, selling, fixing, managing, or leading to actually work.

And maybe, quietly, we also want to know that we are doing okay in it too.

Maybe that is why one answer sat with me longest:

What does success look like?

Because underneath so many of the others, that may be the real question.

Not just: what do I need to do next?
But: is this working?
Am I doing this well?
Will this hold?
Will we win?

So now I’m curious.

What do you say at least sixteen times a day at work?

And more importantly:

What is that sentence trying to hold together?

#MyTransformationDiary

Hot take.

Startup culture talks far too much about passion.

Founders must have it.
Leaders must feel it.
Teams must show it.

But passion fluctuates.

SUSTAINED CURIOSITY builds companies.

An unpopular opinion I stand by: Passion is not the most important trait for a founder or business owner.

Startup ecosystems and organisations often romanticise passion. The idea that if you love what you do enough, everything else will follow.

“You must love your job,” they say.
“Be passionate about what you do.”
“Be proud of the company and product you are building.”

As if the human soul can simply be commanded into permanent enthusiasm.

But what does passion even mean in practice?

No one really explains what it looks like day to day.
No one tells you how to measure it.
No one teaches you how to steward it.

We just keep repeating it to founders, to leaders, to teams, and to young professionals entering the workforce.

Have passion.
Love the work.
Be obsessed.

Yet the truth is much simpler.

Passion fluctuates.

That rush of excitement comes and goes.

It fades with failed experiments.
With delayed product launches.
With difficult hires.
With regulatory hurdles.
With investors who say no.
With customers who do not immediately understand what you are building.
With the quiet months when growth slows but payroll still has to be met.

Passion is powerful. But it is not stable fuel.

In a world where attention spans are shrinking, where multitasking is normal, where trends shift weekly, and where entire career paths are influenced by algorithms and short form content, relying on passion as the primary fuel for building anything meaningful feels increasingly fragile.

What I have observed in companies and institutions that stand the test of time is something different. SUSTAINED CURIOSITY.

A culture of asking questions.
A culture of learning constantly.
A culture of experimenting without ego or fear.

Curiosity that keeps people asking

Why is this not working?
What are we missing?
What can we learn from this failure?
How can this system be improved?
What does the customer actually need?

Curiosity keeps people learning.
Learning keeps organisations adapting.

And adaptation is what allows companies to survive long enough to succeed.

Passion may start the journey.

But SUSTAINED CURIOSITY is what keeps the engine running.

And as I write this, I find myself asking another question.

How do we actually sustain curiosity, especially in the seasons when passion runs low?

In a culture of constant distraction.
Endless multitasking.
Relentless trend chasing.
And the quiet pressure to always move on to the next exciting thing.

I do not have the full answer yet. But I suspect it is a question worth exploring.

This might become my next thesis. Or at least my next subject of curiosity.

A number of people have asked me recently why I suddenly started posting content.

The honest answer is that I did not plan to.

2024 was a year of pause for me. A complete pause. Work slowed down. Public activity slowed down. Internally, a lot was happening. Reflection. Realignment. Surrender.

Then 2025 became a year of miracles.

Without strategic planning, doors began to open. Unexpected conversations. New responsibilities. Miracles I had not orchestrated. One of them was stepping into the role of CEO.

It was not a year I engineered. It was a year I was carried by grace.

At first, when I began posting, it was not about building a platform. It was simply gratitude. A testimony of how God amazed me with His mercy. A way of saying, if you are in a season of pause, do not panic. It may not be the end of the story.

But something interesting happened. People started responding.

Not just with applause, but with questions. With gratitude. With stories of their own pauses. With hope. With reflections about leadership, pressure, faith, and responsibility. Conversations opened up in DMs, after events, and across boardroom tables.

In the middle of those conversations, I began to understand something clearly.

Visibility is not vanity when it serves purpose.

Sharing was not about being seen. It was about stewarding what God was building in me. My journey was not given for self-preservation. It was given for multiplication.

So this year, I decided to document intentionally.

To document what it actually takes to build serious things in our context. Especially in technology. Especially in Africa. Especially when faith is part of the foundation.

Intentional about documenting the leadership journey. The decisions. The execution. The governance. The pressure. The internal battles. The faith that anchors it all.

Not because my story is extraordinary, but because too many people are building quietly and hiding what could strengthen someone else.

Your journey is not meant to be buried. It is meant to give light.

So I document.

I recently had the honour of speaking at Latitude Catalyst by Afrents Baraza, in a room filled with African entrepreneurs, development partners, innovators, and operators building what comes next for this continent. The theme was product development and innovation. As I listened to the stimulating conversations, one question kept forming quietly in my mind: What is the next category of African innovation?

Africa does not have a talent problem. Africa does not lack ambition. We have a trade friction problem. And trade friction, in large part, is a payments problem.

In 2022, intra-African trade reached nearly USD 193 billion. Momentum behind AfCFTA is real. The private sector is building. Governments are reforming. Integration is advancing. But trade volume alone does not tell the full story.

Across the continent we are building e-commerce platforms, logistics ventures, digital marketplaces, creator businesses, and export-focused SMEs. Yet the moment value tries to cross a border, friction shows up: settlement delays, opaque FX spreads, fragmented payment ecosystems, reconciliation complexity.

We are not starting from zero. Uganda’s National Payment Switch under the Bank of Uganda is strengthening domestic interoperability. The EAC and COMESA continue advancing regional integration frameworks. Afreximbank’s Pan-African Payment and Settlement System signals continental ambition. The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Cooperatives is driving export-focused reforms. TradeMark East Africa has improved border efficiency across corridors.

But infrastructure without operational alignment at corridor level risks underutilisation. The missing layer is not another grand system. The missing layer is execution.

Cross-border trade does not fail at the policy level. It fails at the operational level. Execution means moving from policy conversations to corridor coordination, from system announcements to PSP interoperability, from national switches to cross-border settlement alignment, from vision to reconciliation discipline.

As CEO of RukaPay, operating within Uganda’s regulated financial ecosystem, I see daily where friction lives: settlement workflows, liquidity timing, reconciliation standards, compliance integration. Participation alone is not enough. Integration is the real work.

Consider the Uganda–Kenya FMCG corridor. Thousands of traders move cosmetics, fashion, accessories, packaged foods, and household goods between Kampala and Nairobi. Friction looks like delayed settlement confirmation, FX shifts eroding margin, reconciliation through screenshots and informal negotiation.

Aligned rails would mean defined settlement timelines, FX locked at point of payment, standardised reconciliation tags, defined dispute resolution, and agent-supported liquidity. That is the difference between survival trade and scalable trade.

Take coffee exporters and agro-processors. Payment delays affect procurement cycles. FX uncertainty affects pricing contracts. Settlement opacity affects diaspora trust. Trade friction compounds across thousands of transactions. It is margin compression. It is delayed procurement. It is lost confidence.

If we are serious about cross-border trade, we must strengthen last-mile infrastructure alignment, agent-powered settlement, SME-specific corridor frameworks, and PSP coordination governance. Interoperability is not just APIs. It is shared standards, shared timelines, shared accountability.

As I gain experience in this sector, I am less impressed by flashy fintech and more interested in infrastructure that works quietly. Clear money flow frameworks. Trust account governance. Interoperable integrations. Agent activation at scale.

At RukaPay, our focus on Seamless Payments is not about building another interface. It is about building inclusive rails. We have built a wallet ecosystem that operates across USSD (*289#), QR, mobile app channels, and integrated business tools, because inclusion in Africa is necessarily multi-channel.

But beyond the interfaces, our deeper work is on the rails themselves: interoperable integrations, structured settlement workflows, disciplined trust account governance, and cross-border coordination with partner institutions. Our objective is not novelty. It is inclusion and scale.

We are building infrastructure designed to connect systems, reduce friction, and enable seamless movement of value across channels and borders. Infrastructure may not be glamorous, but it is foundational to sustainable trade.

Africa will trade. That is inevitable. The real question is whether we will build African rails for African trade.

We do not have an innovation problem. We have a trade friction problem. And solving it may be the most important product decision of our generation.

I didn’t expect much from it. But weeks later, I found myself standing in a hall, training people using the exact framework. I have since trained others as well. That moment made me reflect on why I built it in the first place.

On paper, my life has always looked structured: boardrooms, strategy decks, promotions, digital transformation across Africa. I have spent over a decade supervising teams, influencing strategy, building fintech infrastructure, and operating in high-pressure environments.

From the outside, everything looked disciplined. Internally, that wasn’t always true. For years, I planned the way the world plans: aggressively, ambitiously, anxiously. Targets. Spreadsheets. Milestones. Promotion. And sometimes it worked.

But there were seasons where I was executing and not anchored. That’s when I realized something uncomfortable: achievement can be a terrible god.

When your identity is built on performance, your mental health becomes tied to outcomes. And outcomes are not fully in your control.

Control & the Illusion of Sovereignty

High performers struggle silently with one thing: control. We believe that if we plan well enough, execute hard enough, and think strategically enough, we can eliminate uncertainty.

But markets shift. Health shifts. Relationships shift. Timing shifts. If your peace depends on perfect outcomes, you will live in chronic anxiety. That realization changed how I lead and how I plan.

Why I Built “Plan Surrendered”

I did not build it as a productivity system. I built it as a mental and spiritual protection system.

For me, God is the anchor. But even if you do not share my faith, the principle still holds: you are responsible for diligence; you are not sovereign over outcomes. That distinction saved my mental health.

The Five-Part Model I Use

This is the structure I now endeavor to use personally and professionally.

1. Pause — Schedule Clarity

High performers often confuse motion with progress. Pausing is not laziness; it is strategy.

I block 60 minutes weekly with no phone and no meetings. Ask myself: What is noise? What actually matters this week? Then I write one sentence: “Right now, the most important thing is ______.” and get clarity.

2. Give Thanks — Reframe the Narrative

Gratitude even when things didn’t go the way you planned is not denial; it is measured interpretation. For every disappointment, I ask: What happened? What did this teach me? What strength did this build? Extracting lessons from loss builds resilience.

I built systems around me that remind me to be grateful. A gratitude jar in the office which we fill at the end of every month, a gratitude journal, and the “one thing i am grateful for” with the kids each morning before school drops.

3. Be Honest — Audit the Five Capitals

Life has multiple forms of capital: spiritual (inner alignment), relational (depth of relationships), physical (energy and health), intellectual (growth and learning), and financial (resources and stewardship).

I score each area out of ten honestly and focus on improving the lowest one by a single point each quarter.

4. Dream Clearly — Remove Ego

Dreaming is not about size; it is about clarity. I write vision statements as if it is December 31st. I don’t hold back! Then I write one sentence per life area. I choose one anchor word for the year and identify one keystone habit that unlocks momentum.

Clarity protects you from building things that impress others but quietly exhaust you.

5. Plan — Then Release Control

Structure removes chaos. Surrender removes anxiety. The combination is crucial.

I convert my vision into quarterly priorities, assign accountability, review weekly, and release outcomes daily. I do this for all capitals and identify accountability systems.

You control effort. You influence results. You do not command timing. And that’s OK.

Why This Matters for African Builders

In our ecosystem, we glorify hustle and under-teach alignment. We celebrate visible success and rarely discuss internal collapse.

Mental wellness for leaders is not optional. It is foundational. The strongest leaders I know are not the most aggressive. They are the most anchored.

Final Reflection

When I stood in that room training people on this framework, I realized something simple: the same discipline I use to build systems and infrastructure throughout my career is the same discipline I must use to protect my mental health.

Planning is not about me trying to control everything. It is about me preparing for stewardship.

Not everything is in your control. And admitting that is not weakness. It is wisdom.

Anchoring Scriptures:

• Proverbs 16:3

• Proverbs 21:5

• James 4:15

If you would like the full structured “Plan Surrendered” framework and worksheet, feel free to DM me.

I laughed.

More or less, that defines my career.

I have often been too young, too female or too African in certain rooms.

Last year I gave a keynote in Ghana at a conference with delegates from 52 countries. When I walked on stage, there was visible surprise followed by loud applause. Later someone some ladies told me they expected someone older.

It happens.

In boardrooms, I’ve chaired meetings where people responded to what I said but addressed each other instead of addressing me. So I learned early: Reputation is survival currency. What you are known for matters.

But the harder lesson came when I stepped into fintech. People say payments are saturated. And they’re not wrong.

There are dozens of registered fintechs. Hundreds in the pipeline. Every week someone is launching a wallet.

So when you enter that space, the questions come fast:

1. What will we do differently?

2. How will we survive?

3. Are we too late?

4. Is there even room for us?

If you are not careful, those questions turn into pressure. And CEO does not mean Chief Executive Officer. It means Chief Everything Officer.

Every salary. Every system glitch. Every competitor launch. Every board expectation. Every “Are we too late?” conversation.

You can easily become reactive. You copy instead of designing. You rush instead of thinking. You worry instead of studying. And then you lose clarity.

I remember our first user acceptance test at RukaPay failed badly. The team was crushed. I told them to calm down.

Failure is your greatest asset if you learn from it.

We rebuilt.

Because gaps are your greatest opportunities if you understand them.

Payment is always being made.

Whether it’s you or someone else, money is always moving. The opportunity is not in the crowd.

It is in the existing inefficiency. But you cannot see it if you are always reacting to stress.

And here is where faith grounds me.

God has not opened a WhatsApp group to fundraise for me or find solutions for me.

He knows I am here. He knows RukaPay exists. So I breathe.

Honestly, You can’t pay me enough to stress me. I got grey hair at 25.

There was a season I stepped back completely. I rested. I painted. I went to therapy. I took walks & made bracelets. Because i understood that Peace is strategic.

Peace gives you space to think and allows you to see gaps instead of noise.

Leadership without peace becomes noise but leadership with peace becomes clarity. And clarity builds systems.

Full conversation now live on YouTube.

Transformation Diaries. Entry 2.

Romans 8:28.