Joachim Ewechu’s Unreasonable Case for Staying Involved

At the first Unreasonable East Africa Institute in Kampala, the teams began their mornings by dancing. Documents sent and milestones reached supplied reasons to celebrate. It is a pleasingly undignified detail to find in the early history of an organisation devoted to enterprise. Business development usually arrives carrying a slide deck. Here, it had found its feet.

Joachim Ewechu included the ritual in his reflections on the 2014 programme. A dozen ventures had spent five weeks together, with mentors and investors joining the work. Looking back, he gave celebration a place among the lessons worth keeping. An ordinary task completed could be enough.

Today Ewechu is the co-founder and CEO of SHONA, the Kampala-based business development company. Its work has a longer horizon than a five-week gathering: helping entrepreneurs build companies that can compete, endure, and create value for the people around them. The early dancing makes a useful introduction to that career. Someone has to care about the steps between the big occasions.

Before the pitch, a place to begin

Ewechu grew up on the outskirts of Kampala. His education included St. Mary’s College Kisubi, which he attended from 2005 to 2010. He also went through Educate!, an organisation that teaches young people leadership and entrepreneurship skills. The route into his later work ran through people already trying to make enterprise a practical possibility.

In March 2013, Educate! celebrated his selection for the Acumen Fund East Africa Fellowship alongside fellow graduate George William Bakka and staff member Hawah Nabbuye. The fellowship selected 20 people across the region that year. Ewechu was learning within a community before making communities part of his own working method.

Recognition followed the enterprise work. Ewechu became a Segal Family Foundation African Visionary Fellow in 2017, joined the Devex World fellows in 2018, and was among the African Diaspora Network’s Builders of Africa’s Future awardees in 2019. The names place him within overlapping circles of entrepreneurs, supporters, and people trying to widen access to opportunity. They also show how much of this career has unfolded alongside other builders.

That distinction matters. A founder’s biography can make every relationship look like scenery on the way to an inevitable destination. Ewechu’s work keeps putting the relationships in the foreground. An introduction, a difficult conversation, or someone willing to look at a financial model can change what becomes possible next.

The money had to fit the business

By 2015, Unreasonable East Africa had identified a specific difficulty: promising ventures struggled to find suitable financing between the earliest backing and a larger investment round. The accelerator launched a revolving loan fund offering between $5,000 and $50,000. A fund that could lend, receive repayment, and lend again was a practical response to a gap its entrepreneurs were encountering.

The interesting detail is the attention to fit. Capital comes with a price, a timetable, and expectations. A headline amount tells a reader very little about how those expectations will sit alongside a company’s sales. For a founder, the terms arrive at work every day.

The accelerator also experimented with sharing in its participants’ revenues. In 2016, Ewechu described a model in which companies paid a smaller amount upfront and spread the balance over five to ten years, through a small percentage of annual revenue. Linking payment to a company’s progress gave the support organisation a reason to keep caring about what happened later.

There is an appealing absence of ceremony in that arrangement. A founder can leave a programme with a certificate. The certificate is unlikely to help with next month’s cash flow. Making the relationship last beyond graduation is an attempt to keep the useful people within reach.

“Attitude is the mother of resilience.”

Joachim Ewechu

A name with a needle in it

The organisation’s name eventually caught up with that thinking. Unreasonable East Africa became SHONA, taking its name from a Kiswahili word meaning to stitch. The identity suited the work: bringing businesses together with resources, expertise, and relationships they needed.

The people behind the rebrand described a reassessment that began toward the end of 2016. Ewechu, Ivan Mandela, and George William Bakka had helped start the earlier organisation. Their ambitions were widening from a movement of entrepreneurs tackling particular problems toward a broader concern with how East African economies develop.

By 2019, SHONA had shifted its strategy toward what it calls Good Business. In an essay co-written with Liz Karungi, Ewechu described the idea as intentionally creating value for everyone involved in a company’s success. The owner remained part of the picture. So did the people who made the owner’s success possible.

“Good” is a small word carrying a considerable workload. It has to survive decisions about prices, wages, suppliers, and the use of resources. A pleasing mission statement gets through an afternoon. A business has to get through the week.

The ledger gets more seats

SHONA’s definition begins with a viable company and extends the accounting beyond its owners. Customers, employees, value-chain partners, and the surrounding community belong within the assessment. Profit matters because the business needs to continue. The distribution of value matters because other people have a stake in that continuity.

Ewechu and Karungi acknowledged the thinking they drew on, including B Lab, Conscious Capitalism, and stakeholder theory. Their proposed contribution was to put those ideas to work in East African businesses while those businesses were laying their foundations. There is room for ambition in that choice, and a sensible reluctance to claim invention.

The organisational reach has broadened. A SHONA case study published in 2024 described work with more than 500 small and medium-sized businesses and 2,000 entrepreneurs. It reported more than 1,700 jobs created and over $35 million in investment raised. Those are figures across the organisation’s work and supported businesses, accumulated over time.

The work also includes opening those circles to more entrepreneurs. At a November 2024 gathering of Uganda’s Academy for Women Entrepreneurs community, Ewechu spoke about the knowledge, resources, and networks women needed to build sustainable businesses. The initiative had reached 748 women, and the gathering brought alumnae together with mentors and investors. It is another version of the question running through his career: who gets access to the people who can help?

Access is easy to describe in the abstract. Put a founder, a mentor, and an investor in the same conversation, and it becomes specific. They can discuss a real product, an actual customer, or a decision that has been waiting for someone with the relevant experience. That is where a network earns its keep.

The everyday questions remain stubbornly particular. In comments about scaling businesses, Ewechu has stressed whether the right team is in place, and whether a founder has a plan to bring in missing skills. Growth gives the question urgency. A promising idea still needs people capable of carrying it out.

Back to the family’s soil

For Ewechu, agriculture also carries a family history. In a February 2024 conversation about regenerative enterprise, he described farming across generations, from his great-grandparents to himself. He remembered a change in the taste of food and the growing dependence on outside inputs. His route into the subject had passed through the family table.

He recalled meeting Hannes Van den Eeckhout around 2021 through programme work in Kampala. Van den Eeckhout’s enthusiasm for agroecology and fairness helped draw Ewechu and the SHONA team further into the field. Here again, the story moves through a relationship rather than a solitary revelation.

The collaboration helped produce Rootical, a Ugandan startup studio co-founded by Ewechu. It brings SHONA together with Fresh Ventures Studio to help entrepreneurs build and own regenerative agri-food companies. The work reaches back to the period before a business has settled into its shape.

That earlier starting point allows a different sequence. Prospective founders can investigate a problem before committing themselves to an idea. They test possible solutions, work on business models, and form teams. Rootical then becomes a co-founder of selected businesses, adding investment and continued venture-building support.

The studio’s published model describes a 12-to-18-month co-founding stage, with ongoing support beyond it. That duration gives the phrase “staying involved” some weight. It makes space for the awkward interval when a team has evidence to examine, assumptions to change, and a product that still needs customers.

The financing problem follows the work into agriculture. SHONA Capital, where Ewechu is a board member and Ivan Mandela is CEO, describes lending schedules tailored to a business’s cash flows, accompanied by management support. An enterprise’s purpose and its repayment obligations have to inhabit the same calendar.

Knowing when to leave the room

Some of Ewechu’s work has happened around another organisation’s board table. He was a founding board member of Street Business School when it began its independent life in 2018. On June 30, 2026, he and fellow founding board member Torkin Wakefield completed their terms.

The transition gave that chapter a clear ending. Street Business School described their role in guiding years of growth and change; it also marked the arrival of a board and CEO entirely drawn from people who had not been there at the independent launch. An institution supported by its founders had reached a different stage.

For SHONA, the horizon remains open. Its published strategy sets a 2030 goal of 1,000 Good Businesses positively benefiting 35 million people. That is an ambition for the organisation, with years of work still attached to it. The verbs in the present are more modest: guide, back, connect.

They are verbs that require company. Someone needs advice; someone else can offer it. A business needs money on terms it can carry. Two people have to meet before they can build anything together. Ewechu has made those connections a working concern. The applause may be brief. There is plenty to do when it stops.