Frequently asked questions.

We want to uproot the food system.

We want to re-imagine, re-invent and rebuild it from the roots up, changing the food system one start-up at a time.

We are rootically different. Radical in our purpose.

Building a food system that is more regenerative, fair and inclusive. We don't compromise on our values. We root for changing the way our agri-food businesses are financed, managed and owned.

Root!cal is not an incubator nor an accelerator for existing businesses and teams.

You come as an individual and potentially leave as a co-founder of a newly established agri-food company. We do systemic venture building. That means we start from even before ideation, by jointly analysing and creating a deep understanding of the problems in the food system we would like to address.

Of course, you bring your full self, ideas, motivation, skillset, etc. to the table. Yet, to join the process as a potential founder, you need to be willing to adapt or let go from your initial ideas and focus if the process points us to more important leverage points and priorities.

No. You will be selected individually for the talents, experience, ideas and energy you bring. Root!cal is not an incubator or accelerator for existing teams and businesses.

This one is tricky. We want to gather the 40 most entrepreneurial food system change-makers we can find. We know these ambitious profiles in Uganda usually manage a job and a couple of personal business projects on the side.

Yet, don’t they remain side businesses because the operator’s energy is so diffused? We are convinced you cannot build a scalable, impactful and commercially viable business with less than 100% of your dedication.

Our stage 1 — the 10-days food system leadership crash course — can be attended without resigning to your job. It is a phase where both you and us get to know each other better. Nevertheless, stages 2 and 3 — a total of 3 months of full-time in-house venture building — will require your full-time commitment. That is why we pay participants a stipend in those stages, for them to cover for basic personal and family expenses. Let’s talk about this if it poses a real difficulty for you to join the programme, especially if you are a more senior profile.

You are a venture builder, a future founder. We expect you to show up with that mentality. You’re not a trainee, student, or employee.

No. One sentence you will often hear in systemic venture building is “trust the process!”. Root!cal offers the safe space and structured process to build commercially viable and impactful businesses for founders that are ready to take the leap with us.

Root!cal is not an incubation programme. We are a pre-team, pre-idea venture building programme. What is particular about our start-up studio is that you will be leading the development of your business from before ideation. We start with building a good understanding of the problem by conducting a participatory food system analysis to identify the key challenges you want to address. Only after that ‘problem loving’, we will start ideating and iterating on potential solutions and business models to address those systemic challenges.

No, not immediately. Rootical does not intend to start farms directly. We are looking to build agri-food businesses beyond the one farm level.

However, the business that will be developed and co-founded as part of Rootical, are intended to support farmers in their transition to regenerative and agroecological agriculture (see the question on our Theory of Change). Transition finance solutions, technical advisory services, input distribution mechanisms… the possibilities are endless. Which solutions that will be built and provided first, will depend on the priorities and interests of our cohorts of founders.

Rootical builds businesses that can offer you solutions to start/develop a regenerative farm on your land. We don’t provide these solutions ourselves to individual farmers.

No. Rootical is not an incubator or accelerator. We do not provide any grants or investment in existing businesses at the moment.

Rootical is a startup studio, which means that we build businesses together, from scratch, with a structured design process based on a deep and participatory analysis of the food system problem. Our ‘future founders’ get selected individually for their potential as leaders of the businesses we will be building together.

Rootical aims to work with founders from all over Uganda, from Kisoro to Kaabong and anywhere in between.

During the different stages of our training and business building process, we will provide transport refunds to Kampala and lodging solutions close to the workspace and office we will be at.

Rootical will become a co-founder of the businesses created in the Studio co-founding stage. At the end of the 3-months venture building process, 6 teams and business models will be invited into the studio for co-founding. This investment decision and final selection will be made by the Investment Committee.

When invited into the studio, these Rootical portfolio companies will be incorporated and launched with an initial investment of between 20 and 40 million UGX in early 2024. We are still defining how that investment (valuing Rootical’s cash and in-kind contributions throughout the programme) will be paid back to Rootical over time as the businesses grow. Most likely this will take the form of a revenue-based and/or convertible loan agreement.

To recall, Rootical is about building businesses from scratch. The agrifood businesses we will be together will result from our joint analysis of the food system and human-centred venture building process.

This is not a financing opportunity for existing teams/businesses to join our programme. Rootical’s business is building businesses that are capable of paying a return on our investment over time. We will not survive if the businesses we found together do not become commercially viable and grow to a scale where they can pay back those investments.

In short, you as a future founder.

Rootical does not aim to take majority decision rights of the companies we will be building together.

Co-founding means that i) we go through the process of building businesses together, from problem loving to ideation, prototyping, incorporation all the way to product-market fit and beyond; ii) Rootical invests, both our in-kind support and a minimum startup capital of 20-40M UGX; this investment has to be paid back (see previous question); and iii) we might take a board seat to follow and contribute to the decision making of the Rootical businesses in their early days.

We aim to phase out both our financial involvement (when pre-defined returns are paid back) and minority participation in decision making over time. At that time, you and other co-founders and stewards will fully own the decision making of your regenerative agri-food business.

While we know that women are the driving force behind the rural economy in Uganda, research also shows that social norms and household responsibilities generate ‘time poverty’ for most women and further deepens the gender gap.

These gender inequalities persist, all the way from Uganda’s farms to the entrepreneurship ecosystem. There are no specific figures known for Uganda, but more than 8 out of 10 African founder teams that successfully raised money in 2021 were male-only.

Root!cal encourages female entrepreneurs to participate and wants to actively decrease the gender gap in funding, the workforce and founder teams.

Moreover, Root!cal is conscious about the additional thresholds that female entrepreneurs face and foresees solutions for lactating women (see next question), supports caretakers and offers flexibility in the training programme. For more questions about your specific situation and how we can support your participation, do not hesitate to contact us.

Of course.

If you are a lactating mother, we provide transport, accommodation, and meals for the caretaker of your baby. On the training location, we provide a nursing room where the caretaker is comfortable and where you can breastfeed or pump milk if it is not possible to bring your baby along. A freezer will be available to store your milk. Please let us know beforehand in the registration forms so that we can take the required action to optimise your stay and ensure your participation.

Rootical aims to provide equal opportunities and reduce any barriers to your participation. If you require any special assistance (e.g., wheelchair access, sign language interpretation, etc.) please apply and reach out to us. We have a specific budget to facilitate your participation.

That is not something we can guarantee. While we will actually encourage forming teams and provide strategies to do so, a lot of this will have to happen naturally. In stage 3, we expect to be working with 18 potential founders on about 10-12 ideas. So, some of you will be working individually, others in complementary co-founder teams of 2 or 3. Finding a co-founder can be a key goal when going into the studio co-founding stage with us

Please do. Especially if you are a female entrepreneur and/or a more seasoned manager with 10+ years of corporate experience.

On our ‘contact’ page, you can see the office hours and number to call or whatsapp for your personal questions. Please respect our office hours for calls.

We would love to attend to you with any specific question and eliminate doubts about any barriers that you might feel could hinder your participation. We have foreseen some measures to facilitate the participation of lactating women and young mothers, people with disabilities, and people that would potentially be excluded otherwise.

No. Rootical does not charge any application fee at any point in time before or during the application process. Getting a shot at joining our Founder journey, is free of charge.

Please note, no one should ask you to pay an application fee to be able to apply for joining Rootical. If they do, it is probably a scam, fraudulent people trying to extract money from you. If this happens to you, please report it to us via info@rootical.org

The Rootical Founder journey consist of 3 stages largely:

After your application and getting selected, i) you are invited to join a 10-days food system leadership course (with physical, full-time presence); ii) the next stage will be 3-months of full-time, residential venture building in Kampala to move from a validated problem statement to ideation, testing solutions, prototyping, business modelling and planning; iii) up to six businesses are selected for co-founding in the studio stage and work towards incorporation, their first paying customers and follow-on investors.

Timeline:

Food system leadership course (40 participants): August 2-11

3-months systemic venture building (24 participants): mid September to mid December

Co-founding stage (up to 6 businesses): from January 2024 onwards.

To provide equal opportunities, we do not charge for your participation to the programme.

To make sure you can fully commit to the full-time venture building process (stages 2 and 3), we will provide all selected potential founders with a stipend of 1 million Ugandan shillings per month to cover basic personal and family expenses.

If your business / team is invited into the Studio co-founding phase… the real entrepreneurial journey is only starting. Getting a good income out of a newly created business — especially when bootstrapping — can take time.

However, if you are looking for a paid job, we encourage you to not apply to become an entrepreneur and business owner with us. It simply wont work for you nor for us.

If you really want to know the answer, find out all about steward ownership on the website of the Purpose foundation. We highly recommend the video and purpose book (3rd link) you can find there.

https://purpose-economy.org/en/whats-steward-ownership/

Steward ownership is an alternative ownership model being piloted across the globe. Large companies like Zeiss, Bosch, Rolex, Playmobil have been running on steward ownership principles for decades, and even centuries. Excitingly, Ecosia and Patagonia have also recently joined that list. Read why in the links!

Steward ownership has proven to yield higher job satisfaction, better employee retention and participation rates, stronger feelings of job security, and even higher productivity per employee. A study with 300 companies in Denmark found that steward-owned companies are overall more profitable and have higher market values. Finally, they are built for the long term: steward-owned companies are 6 times more likely to celebrate their 40th birthday.

In short, steward ownership is a way to change how our food companies are financed, managed and owned. To lock their purpose in their legal DNA and avoid mission drift — that is when companies succumb under short term financial pressure when they raise more venture capital in subsequent rounds of financing, diluting and compromising on their initial values and purpose.

This will largely depend on the findings from our participatory food system analysis (in stage 1), the priorities you will set as our cohort and the talent, motivation, skills, experience, etc. that each of you brings to the table.

Enabling smallholder farmers in their transition to regenerative agriculture is at the heart of our purpose. We will provide an onramp to do so by building start-ups that either provide solutions to support them in that transition on the productive side or by creating companies that buy their produce as a market incentive to start or continue producing regeneratively. That is our theory of change in a nutshell.

For the first, business idea examples could include: providing large-scale access to affordable bio-pesticides, crop insurance mechanisms, transition finance solutions, etc. For the latter, we can think of a regenerative consumer brand, marketplace platforms, processing-as-a-service models, etc. These are just examples of what we would be excited to build, if you ask us right now.

We focus on regenerating the food system and building solutions that support farmers in their transition to regenerative agriculture and mainstream Ugandan consumers to access more healthy and affordable food. See the previous question.

Within the scope of that transforming the food system goal, we did not pick any specific focus areas (e.g., livestock, or vegetables and fruits). The focus and priority areas will be defined as a result of the food system analysis we will conduct together in our first stage, the 10-days food system leadership course.

To decide which businesses will advance through the process we will base our decisions on their potential impact on reducing soil, land, and environmental degradation, hunger and malnutrition, and (food) inequality.

With Rootical we aim to design, co-create and build regenerative agri-food businesses to transform the food system. But what is “regenerative”?

That’s a long and global debate. But, in short, regenerative means the opposite of degenerative —destroying, eroding, degenerating the soil, farms and ecosystems that feed us.

Regenerative is about farming with nature. It is about leaving your soil healthier and more alive than when you found it, strengthening its capacity to grow, nourish and nurture plants (food), harvest season after harvest season.

Depending on the context, regenerative agriculture includes no-till farming, eliminating the use of agrochemicals, cover crops, mulching, crop association, crop rotation, integrating livestock, etc.

In their principles, regenerative agriculture, organic, and agroecology are strongly aligned. They all evolve around the 4 organic principles of Care, Fairness, Ecology and Health.

Read more here:

https://medium.com/@ethansoloviev/regenerative-agriculture-continuum-4346f78dde3e

https://www.agroecology-pool.org/

https://regenerationinternational.org/why-regenerative-agriculture/

We provide purpose-driven entrepreneurs with the access to expertise, funding, tools and a systemic venture building process to own their agri-food businesses in Uganda.

Through training, venture building, networks and financial support (=input), Rootical contributes to the capacity of Ugandan social entrepreneurs to build regenerative businesses (=output). These purpose-driven businesses will be geared towards either supporting farmers in their transition to agroecology on the production side, or incentivising that transition by buying their produce (=outcome).

This should in turn accelerate the demand-driven transition to a more fair, inclusive, distributed and regenerative food system. This is expected to contribute positively to reduced hunger and inequality, and to healthy diets and resilient and thriving ecosystems, local economies and communities (=impact).