By Najib Mulema
Daniel Mickoh is among the few Ugandans who have kept their dreams alive through inspiration and hardwork.
Born on December 20, 1989, the youthful entrepreneur and digital marketing genius believes he is a ‘gift from God’.
During birth, Mickoh says it’s his legs that came out first. That is why he was named Mickoh, literally meaning “A gift from God to the world”.
In his childhood, life was all rosy; His father was one of the top employees at National Water and Sewerage Corporation (NWSC) but around 1995, a misfortune befell Mickoh’s family.
His father, who was the breadwinner lost his job. That was the time that Mickoh and siblings began to taste the real meaning of hard life.
“We downgraded from riches to rags. Beans and posho was the order of the day,” disclosed the proprietor of TENGE; a fast-growing afro-centric school of fashion in Africa.
Soon the beans and posho were also a luxury.
In 1999, his father took him and his young brother to Lira and placed him in the hands of his sister. She made a living from frying ‘mandazi’.
Kony insurgency, school troubles
The Kony-led insurgency in Northern Uganda then was at its peak around the time he was bundled off to live with his aunt.
He recounts, “In Lira, life was even harder because we were always engaged in running battles as well as hide and seek with the rebels.”
One particular incident stands out. One day, suspected rebels attacked Abiya village and by the end of the three hour ordeal, about 30 people had been brutally killed, including some of his relatives.
On top of the Kony problem at a time, Mickoh says managing to attain education was also another pain in the throat.
“I went to Lira when I was in Primary Four and I was always among the school fees defaulters. Life went on like that and whenever I got school fees, through doing casual jobs like selling maize and digging, I always opted to pay it for my young brother because for him he wasn’t as sharp and bold as I,” he says.
Realizing his dream:
By God’s grace, Mickoh completed his primary education. He was admitted to Dara Christian High School, Lira. But since he was a bright, but financially poor student, he was given a scholarship in Senior Three which greatly helped him excel in his Ordinary Level. He was the second best candidate in the school.
The hardships he was facing at this point shaped him to try and mentor other people who were in his situation, or even worse.
“During S.3, I read a book titled ‘Think and Grow Rich.’ My mindset completely changed. So I told guys in my class that ‘one day I will have one of the biggest hospitals, biggest schools, or even biggest companies in the world and that I will inspire a minimum of three million people in this life to reach their potential’. Obviously, they used to discourage me but I kept my dream alive,” says Mickoh.
In order to put his dream into action, he started by writing ‘inspirational chits’ to students. By doing this, Mickoh notes that many of his colleagues regained confidence and hope thus prospering in their day-to-day lives.
Through inspirational scriptures, he regained popularity at school and in the due course was elected to various leadership positions such as academics prefect, Sports prefect among others.
The return to Kampala:
After completing his O’level, Mickoh recalls that someone promised his father that he will pay his A’ Level tuition at Bishop Cipriano Kihangire in Luzira.
Unfortunately, the Good Samaritan paid school fees for only one term which forced Mickoh to temporarily drop out of school for over a year.
Stranded, with little or no hope left for returning to school, Pastor Micah Rwothumio of University Community Fellowship (UCF) came for Mickoh’s rescue.
“After staying out of school for one full year, Pastor Rwothumio, also my dad’s childhood friend, started to pay my school fees. He told me to choose any school of my choice and I took on Green Hill. Pastor Micah also paid for two terms and left. So I had to find my way through,” revealed Mickoh.
While at Green Hill, he continued giving out inspirational notes to classmates. This plan, he believes is the reason his Science class posted the best performance at Uganda Advanced Certificate of Education (AUCE) the school has ever had.
Mickoh boasts; “Though I wasn’t the top student in performance, the award for the best candidate was given to me and my school fees debt cleared by the School Director.”
The breakthrough?
In order to pursue his dream of instilling hope and empowering people specifically women, Mickoh thought aerospace engineering would be the fasted way of accumulating much money which he would later use to set up his social projects.
After completing his high school, he applied for an aerospace engineering course at the University of California. However his application was turned down which called for plan B.
He got a slot at African Bible University in Lubowa, Entebbe Road. He undertook a bachelor’s degree in Theology and Community Leadership.
His plan was to pass time at his current University as he tried his luck again by applying to other universities oversees.
However, Mickoh says, his first lecture at the university completely changed his entire life.
“I went into an IT class and the lecturer tells us that his wife makes USD1,500 a month and all she does are clerical jobs online ‘If you can find out how she does that you will get straight As in all my papers.’ Being a kind of a person who doesn’t want to read books, that was a perfect chance for me,” Mickoh said..
“I made a calculation that if she can do a,b,c,d and gets all that money, I would make more money than her. That’s how I entered into digital marketing,” he adds.
He further says after coming up with a mega digital marketing plan, he went to google to find ways of how to make money online.
At first it was not an easy since on several occasions he fell victim of online fraudsters who scammed him a lot of money.
But Mickoh’s breakthrough came around 2010 August when he decided to promote one of the products of Mark Ling; a popular internet marketing expert. That was the first time Facebook got in touch with him.
“My over 1,000 fake Facebook accounts which I used to promote products also attracted Ariana Huffington’s attention. Ms Huffington in turn asked him to write articles for her publication. That was alos around the time I got a chance to test the Facebook ads platform, and also that was the first time I made USD138 in one day,” he says. “After that I started making between USD1,000 to USD2,000 a month and still a reached a time where I made USD5,000 to USD10,000a month online.”
Mickoh discloses that though he made a lot of money that time from online marketing, he forgot about his dream of empowering people.
“I made a lot of money but also misused a lot of it, I even forgot about my dream, I started to live a fancy life and by graduation I was totally broke,” he says, adding, “I became so confused.”
After declaring himself broke, Mickoh decided to go back to Lira to cool down the pressure around him.
While in Lira he went back on the drawing board where he would strategize and reawaken his dream.
He started by involving himself in social activities like visiting schools, taking part in talk shows preaching hope and offering small financial support to needy people as well as doing small projects for marketing companies.
“That’s where I started building all this moment again. I was reading more, I was strategizing more and after six months I came back to Kampala,”
In Kampala, he did digital marketing for several companies and the biggest breakthrough came in 2015 when he went to do work for Christ Embassy where he distributed over 84 million copies of their Rhapsody of Realities in less than four months.
“No one had ever done that in their history but because I had a simple marketing skill I was able to do it for them and in return they thanked me by giving me tens of thousands of dollars,”
And from there, Mickoh has never looked back. He has travelled around the world training small business owners.
Birth of Tenge:
Mickoh says the idea of Tenge (derived from kitenge) came in 2017 and it was all about empowerment.
“I wanted to produce something that’s so unique that would tell African story-based on the fashion and design industry. I knew that if we can produce stuff that can really define who we are through the clothes we don, the bags we hold, the shoes wear, then I would have succeeded,” he says.
So before the birth of Tenge, He was working with many pregnant women and prostitutes. His idea was to rehabilitate these people by giving them better jobs because he didn’t like the idea of the prostitutes selling their bodies.
When I sat and heard their stories, I was really touched. I then realized that these are the people that I had to help. I thought of something we could do that is so unique and take the name of Africa far and wide and also employ more than a 1,000 people. Clothing was the way to go thus the formation of Tenge,” he said.
Through Tenge Fashion and Design School in Kabalagala, Mickoh says they have trained a good number of people including underprivileged women and girls and given them startup capital as well as market for their finished products through the Tenge social media platform.
Apparently, most of the trained people are now proud owners of small scale business owners.
Future prospects:
Mickoh says in five years’ time he wants to have a minimum of five million small scale business owners in fashion and design industry on his Tenge platform and also generate USD5 million from the same platform.
He also reveals that he wants the Tenge platform to be the biggest digital market platform in Africa and employ 100,000 Africans.
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