Overview:
How Entebbe based 75-year-old entrepreneur Asiimwe Kagoro built ConstraWorks over three decades, with disciplined savings, patient reinvestment and a banking relationship that began in 1992.
At 75 years of age, Engineer Asiimwe Kagoro’s story is less about a dramatic leap than the compounding value of careful decisions: leaving salaried employment to take the risk of starting small, saving consistently and choosing partners he believed would endure.
For anyone familiar with the Entebbe municipality business community, ConstraWorks workshop is a well-known enterprise and Mzee Kagoro is a respected name.
Located along the 1st Street, Plot: 2-4 in Entebbe, the scale of the business is visible in timber, machinery and the buildings that now occupy the site. The timber yard alone holds stock valued at about Shs 500 million.
Across the workshop stand roughly 25 modern machines used to make doors, frames, kitchen units, wardrobes, floorboards and other fittings for hotels, apartments and homes.
Yet the enterprise did not begin with machinery or warehouses. The story began in 1990 beneath a jackfruit tree shade, where a small makeshift workshop offered the first home for a wood workshop that Mzee Kagoro was building from scratch.
Occasionally, like a Christian pilgrimage, he returns to that modest beginning as if to measure the distance travelled. Today, ConstraWorks has grown into a specialized construction-engineering and wood-processing business whose structures and capital value at about Shs 3 billion.
Its products have reached Tanzania, Kenya and South Sudan, while customers have carried its work into the Democratic Republic of Congo. Its warehouses also store medicines for National Medical Stores for distribution around Uganda.
The numbers tell a story of growth. The more revealing story, however, lies in how that growth happened: through professional training, accumulated savings, cautious borrowing and the steady reinvestment of proceeds from one line of work into another.
| “I always thought I should be an employer, not an employee.” |
The engineer who chose to build
Kagoro trained as an engineer at the University of Leeds on a British scholarship and later completed a master’s degree in engineering at the University of Birmingham in 1984.
He returned to Uganda in 1985 and joined the Ministry of Local Government, which posted him to Entebbe to support engineering work there. Roads were his specialty, although his work also covered water projects.
Four years later, he left the civil service. The move was driven by an ambition that had followed him through formal employment: he wanted, eventually, to create work for others rather than remain an employee himself.
He joined JPG, a consulting firm, where the pay allowed him to save a substantial share of his earnings. Those savings became part of the foundation for ConstraWorks, which he had registered in 1988. He acquired land soon afterwards and, by 1990, the workshop under the jackfruit tree was in operation.
Woodwork was not an obvious extension of road engineering. Kagoro saw it as a practical business he could continue building long after formal employment.
At the time, he says, there were relatively few artisans in the trade. He also wanted work that would continue to give structure and purpose to his days, rather than a retirement spent at home reading newspapers.
Growth, one reinvestment at a time
ConstraWorks did not immediately rely on woodwork alone. The company undertook building and road construction, then channeled the proceeds into expanding the workshop. Each contract helped finance the next stage of the enterprise.
Kagoro combined his savings with his National Social Security Fund (NSSF) money to put up the company’s first warehouse. He had intended to use it for manufacturing, but it was rented almost immediately.
Rather than treat the rental income as personal profit, he deposited it into the company’s account and reinvested it in the business.
By 2010, he had phased out road and building construction and concentrated on wood. ConstraWorks had also done metalwork, but concerns about workshop fires persuaded him to stop welding and outsourcing it. The decision narrowed the company’s focus to the work Kagoro believed it could do best.
His approach to finance was similarly measured. In 2013, Stanbic provided a Shs50 million standby facility, principally to allow the company to buy timber when required.
Kagoro repaid it and says he has not needed another borrowing facility since. Much of the business’s expansion, he says, came from savings accumulated through the bank.
| “When I asked for money, the bank listened and gave me a little, because a chicken picks what it can swallow.” |
A bank he believed would stay
Kagoro’s relationship with Stanbic began in 1992, two years after the workshop opened. He went to the bank’s Kampala Road branch, then its only branch in Uganda, to open accounts for himself and the young company.
Uganda’s banking industry was fragile. Banks had closed, and customers had reason to scrutinise where they placed their money. Kagoro wanted more than an account.
He wanted facilities when the business needed them, an institution willing to listen, and the confidence that his bank would remain in Uganda for the long term.
“I did my due diligence and weighed the risks,” he says. “I decided to bank my trust, my money and my ventures with Stanbic, and it worked.”
That relationship became particularly important when ConstraWorks was competing for construction assignments. Tendering required bid securities; winning work required performance bonds. Kagoro says Stanbic often processed the necessary instruments within a day.
Only two months before this interview, the bank issued another guarantee connected to the company’s work with National Medical Stores.
The regular flow of rental income and business earnings through the company’s accounts also helped establish its standing with the bank. Over time, the relationship expanded to include fixed deposits, a corporate relationship manager and periodic visits to the workshop.
Kagoro values candour as much as access to finance: after examining the business, he says, the bank tells him plainly what is likely to work and what is not.
Two journeys through a changing Uganda
The relationship has also given Kagoro a front-row view of how banking has changed. In the early years, transactions were manual. Customers queued, filled out paper forms or signed cheques, and visited a branch to withdraw money.
Today, he transacts through ATMs, online and mobile channels, including FlexiPay and the agent-banking network. He also points to unit trusts as another avenue for saving and earning a return.
Stanbic’s acquisition of Uganda Commercial Bank in 2002 deepened his confidence. By then, Kagoro held several personal and company accounts. To him, the transaction signaled that the bank was putting down roots and intended to remain part of Uganda’s economic life.
His own company was doing the same. ConstraWorks employs people whose wages support households, serves private and public-sector customers, and pays taxes. Kagoro sees this as the practical contribution of enterprise: a business grows, but its value also travels through salaries, suppliers, customers and public revenue.
That perspective explains why his story fits Stanbic’s 35-year milestone. It is not simply an account of a loyal customer or a long banking relationship. It is a portrait of two institutions growing through the same era: a Ugandan enterprise built patiently from the ground up, and a bank that provided the accounts, guarantees, facilities and advice that helped it compete.
Built to endure
At nearly 80, Kagoro’s pride remains anchored in the physical evidence of persistence. The business that began under a jackfruit tree now has warehouses, machinery, valuable timber stock and customers beyond Uganda’s borders.
Its estimated Shs 3 billion structures and capital was not assembled through one transformative loan or a sudden breakthrough, but through more than three decades of work and disciplined reinvestment.
He describes the qualities he values in Stanbic in three words: reliability, flexibility and trustworthiness. In an industry where institutions have opened, closed, been sold or changed names, continuity has carried real economic value for him.
Kagoro believes Stanbic will continue growing alongside Uganda. His own journey offers a quieter lesson about what sustainable growth can look like: begin with what is available, save before expanding, borrow within the business’s capacity, and build relationships sturdy enough to outlast difficult cycles.
The jackfruit tree is where the story began. What stands in Entebbe today is the result of everything that came after: one careful decision, one contract and one reinvestment at a time.