When Haruna Sentongo tells his story, a wind of hope and belief reaches whoever hears or reads it because he is a true example that everything is possible as long one takes seriously some disciplines such as persistence.
A poor young man from the present day Kalungu district began the journey of his financial breakthrough at the age 16 years. He began with Shs300,000 which he got from his father during his the O-level vacation.
As a parent, Mr Sentongo’s father Haruna Segawa never wanted his boy to waste his vacation holiday, therefore he gave him that money purposely to keep him busy during the entire holiday.
The young Sentongo invested the money into buying women’s bags and started selling them in a kiosk which was not his. At times he could vendor them. Like how the holy books say that God blesses hands that work, Mr Sentongo’s hands were blessed and out of his first stock, he made profits of Shs1m.
According to him, the shs1m profit brought a new wave of hope that forced him to work hard day and night. As it kept multiplying, he moved from the level of kiosks to wholesale. The level of wholesale also brought new hope too.
In the space of two years, Mr. Sentongo started thinking out of the box and ventured into another field of selling homes and office furniture at Ben Kiwanuka Street in Kampala.
The two businesses; furniture and women’s bag, created a strong muscle in his establishment and in 2007, he started importing garments from countries like China, Thailand, and Malaysia. He would then sell both wholesale and retail to Ugandans, as well as supply South Sudan, Congo, and Kenya.
After many years of trading in bags and garments and paying a lot of money in rent, Mr Sentongo who was by then an upcoming city entrepreneur realised that having his own stores to keep his stock of goods was better than renting.
Therefore he started to invest in the real estate business with the aim of making more money and also providing stores to other fellow traders at a small fee. However, along the way, he realised that real estate was a super jackpot for him to accumulate more money and one would say it’s one of his current largest earning businesses.
In 2011, he incorporated Haruna Enterprises U Limited through which he started constructing Haruna Towers in Wandegeya. Using his money from the real estate, he embarked on acquiring more pieces of land to develop properties like shopping malls and arcades.
Through real estate, he bought huge chunks of land in Kisenyi where he built the Segawa Market complex, a block having over 320 shops of different sizes and shapes.
Having mastered the rules of the real estate game, currently Mr Sentongo’s properties house over 2,000 businesses, and approximately 100,000 customers while his enterprise employs more than 600 people.
In one of the interviews he recently conducted, Mr Sentongo, also a younger brother to property mogul Hamis Kiggundu, revealed that the mystery of his success is getting accustomed to a culture of saving, building trust and creditworthiness with financial institutions that helped him secure loans and having great faith in God.
The 35-year-old billionaire is one of Uganda’s most outstanding young entrepreneurs, He was Born on August 30th, 1987 and his estimated net worth is USD 420m (approximately Shs1.7 trillion).
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