Building a Student Startup in Rwanda: Lessons from Our First Year

How It Started

VAF UBWENGE TECH did not start with a business plan. It started with a conversation between students who were frustrated that the technology problems they saw around them every day were not being solved by anyone they knew.

We were studying in Kigali, surrounded by a city that was growing fast — new businesses, new residents, new demand for services. And we kept seeing the same gap: digital tools built for other markets being forced onto Rwandan users, with predictably poor results.

The First Year Was Not Glamorous

The romanticized version of a startup is late nights fueled by passion and breakthrough moments. The reality of our first year was more mundane: debugging API integrations before an 8am lecture, rewriting the same onboarding flow four times because users kept getting confused, and explaining to skeptical drivers why they should trust an app built by students.

We got a lot wrong. Our first version of the driver app had too many screens. Our initial price model overfit badly to our small training dataset. We spent two weeks building a feature that users told us in five minutes they did not need.

What We Got Right

We talked to users constantly. Not surveys — actual conversations. We rode with drivers. We sat with shop owners. We watched people use the app and resisted the urge to explain it when they got confused, because their confusion was data.

We also made a decision early on to keep the team small and trust each other completely. No wasted energy on internal politics. Everyone built, everyone tested, everyone talked to users. That flatness made us faster than any larger team could have been.

Balancing School and a Startup

There is no clean answer to this. Some weeks the startup won and our grades reflected it. Some exam periods the startup went quiet and that was fine. We learned to be honest with each other about capacity instead of pretending everything was manageable all the time.

Being students also gave us advantages we did not fully appreciate at first. We had access to faculty with deep technical knowledge, peers who became early users, and institutional credibility when talking to potential partners.

What Surprised Us Most

The hardest problems were not technical. Code is patient — you can debug it, refactor it, start over if you need to. Building trust with a community that has every reason to be skeptical of a new technology product requires time and consistency that no sprint can shortcut.

We were also surprised by how much support existed once we started looking for it. The Rwandan tech ecosystem is small but genuinely collaborative. Founders who had been building longer than us were generous with their time and honest about their mistakes.