Kevin Tusiime and Leadership Shifts in Africa and New Educational Paradigms.

1. What are your names?

Kevin Tusiime. I usually introduce myself as a recovering tech worker turned 

schoolteacher — though my mother is still trying to figure out how she lost me to 

teaching.

2. Where did you go to school?

Mugwanya Preparatory in Kabojja, then Kampala Parents', then King's College Budo 

— Nigeria House, 2010 to 2015. After that, a brief detour through Makerere, where I 

lasted all of two semesters. Then the University of Rochester in upstate New York, 

which is where I actually finished my degree. If you ask me which one made me, the 

answer is Budo. For better and for worse — and I mean both.

3. What did you study?

At Makerere, Industrial Chemistry. For one semester. I dropped out to chase 

entrepreneurship. Came back for another semester. Dropped out again. Then I got 

into Rochester on a full ride and did a dual degree in Computer Science and African 

Economic Development — economics with a particular focus on how the continent 

develops. I also did enough Chinese (88 credits) to almost call it a third major. That 

was deliberate. I figured if Africa's economic future runs through China, I should at 

least be able to negotiate in the language.

4. Tell us about what you do — you seem quite passionate about education.

Right now I'm a founding guide at Forge Prep, a microschool in New Jersey where 

we help students graduate by launching real businesses. That's the current chapter.

But the whole story is that I've been trying to fix education — particularly Ugandan 

education — since I was 19. I'd just finished near the top of my class at Budo. 

Sixteen years of formal schooling. And the best-paying job I could find in my vac was 

hawking passion fruit door to door in Kampala. That broke something in me. Or 

maybe it fixed something. Either way, I never recovered.

Since then I've taken a lot of detours that look unrelated on a résumé. I ran Airbnbs 

in Kololo. I built E-JAB, the digital portal that almost replaced the paper PUJAB form 

before COVID killed it. I got into Rochester on scholarship, finished CS and African 

Economic Development, and went on to Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Google as an 

engineer and product manager.

From the outside, that looked like a tech career. From the inside, it was a ten-year 

detour. The clarifying moment came when a VC friend looked at my LinkedIn one 

afternoon and said, "Kevin, you should do something in education." That's when it 

landed — I wasn't a tech founder looking for an idea. I was an educator trying to 

escape my calling.

So now I'm building. Forge Prep is the immediate vehicle. The bigger long-term 

project is Douglass Leadership Academy — an American-curriculum boarding school 

I want to open in East Africa, which I also see as the anchor tenant for a future 

charter city. I write about all of it on Substack if you want the long version.

5. Tell us about your journey into tech.

E-JAB was the bridge. When I was building it — this scrappy attempt to digitize the 

PUJAB form so students could stop standing in lines outside Makerere with paper 

applications — I'd just finished applying to 20 US colleges from my bedroom on the 

Common App. The asymmetry was insulting. Code was clearly the medium that let 

one person do the work of fifty.

So when I got to Rochester I tacked on a CS minor. That summer I applied to 

internships everywhere — banking, consulting, tech. The banks and the 

consultancies didn't bite. Microsoft and Google did. They liked the E-JAB story 

because it read as builder, not student. Microsoft hosted me that summer. After that I 

doubled down: upgraded the minor to a second major, then jumped to LinkedIn, then 

Google as an APM.

But tech was always the means, never the end. Even sitting in those open offices in 

Mountain View, I was thinking about Uganda.

6. You're building education for 2040, not 1940. What's the difference?

The 1940 model assumes a particular economy — factories, offices, jobs where you 

mostly execute someone else's instructions. So the school becomes a factory too: 

teacher up front, students in rows, bells, standardized output. Compliance is the 

actual lesson. Math is the cover story. That economy is dying. By 2040, the kids in 

classrooms today will be entering a labor market where any skill that can be written down 

as a procedure has been automated. What survives — what gets paid — is the ability to 

spot a problem nobody told you about, build a solution, sell it, and rally other humans to 

your side. That's entrepreneurship, broadly defined. Not the Shark Tank version. The 

everyday version. The version where you walk into a restaurant and figure out how to 

design a school lunch menu with them — which is literally what our students are doing right 

now in something we call the Lunch Challenge. So at Forge there's still some explicit 

instruction — you can't be entrepreneurial about a subject you don't understand. But the 

spine of the program is real projects, with real artifacts, for real audiences. The 1940 school 

produces good test-takers. We're trying to produce people who can make things exist that 

didn't exist before.

7. Tell us about the incentive-based learning model.

This comes out of watching mobile money do something banks couldn't do in Uganda for 

decades. Banks tried. They couldn't make the unit economics work because every village 

would have needed a brick-and-mortar branch with security and staff. Then MTN basically 

said: what if instead of branches, we let any entrepreneur with a small amount of capital 

set up a mobile money stall and take a cut? Suddenly the network built itself. Capital-lite. 

Self-scaling. The kiosk owner has skin in the game. The customer is closer to home. The 

telco wins. Now look at education. We're trying to do it the bank way — expensive schools, 

expensive teachers, the same absenteeism we've had since UPE. Meanwhile every trading 

center has an internet café, Starlink is collapsing connectivity costs, Khan Academy is 

free, AI tutors are now basically here. What if we paid the student directly — small mobile 

money payments — to show up at the local café, log into Kolibri or Khan, and demonstrate 

mastery? The café owner takes a cut for hosting and verifying. The donor or government 

pays per outcome instead of per enrolled head. The two roles I was hiring for were 

essentially: someone to design the incentive structure, and someone to run a pilot. 

There are real questions to answer — gaming, fraud, what "demonstrated mastery" actually 

means — but the underlying mechanism has already proven on this continent that it can 

scale.

8. With your passion for education and tech, why not build an edtech app?

Short answer: there are already thousands of edtech founders building apps, and most of 

them have advantages I don't — engineering teams, capital, distribution. What they don't 

have is what I have: a Ugandan high school education, a US elite-university education, a 

stint hawking fruit between those two, and almost a decade of obsession with the specific 

gap between those worlds. That's not a generic edtech problem. It's an institutional 

problem — what does the actual school look like, who runs it, how do you import the 

cultural norms of one place into another. Software is downstream of all of that. Build the 

institution first; software second.

9. Share some insights on human capital in the global south.

The dominant narrative — inside and outside Africa — is that we're poor because the West 

stole from us. There's real truth in that. Colonialism happened. Extraction happened. It still 

happens in subtler forms. South Korea was poorer than Uganda in 1960. Botswana and 

Singapore had similar starting points to a lot of African economies. The countries that broke 

out had one thing in common: functioning institutions. Courts that enforced contracts. 

Property rights you could rely on. Bureaucracies that mostly weren't for sale.

Institutions are the binding constraint. Not the only constraint — human capital matters, 

infrastructure matters — but the binding one. You can't grow human capital in an 

environment where the rules are unwritten and change based on who you know. People 

either leave, or they learn to hustle inside the broken system instead of fixing it.

The implication for my own work is that you can't fix education without eventually 

fixing the institutional context it sits inside. That's why DLA isn't just a school — it's 

an attempt to build the kind of environment a graduate can step into and thrive. It is 

also why, my longer thesis involves charter cities. You can't reform a whole country at 

once. But you can build one place where the rules work,and let it grow from there.