8 minute read

Meeting Christopher

Ategeka in the high-rise business incubator

where his three start-ups are headquartered in San Francisco, one would never

guess that this urbane young man, named last year as one of Forbes

Magazine’s 30 under 30 social entrepreneurs, started life in a thatched hut

with dirt walls in rural Uganda—and was in his teens before he owned his first

pair of shoes.

Imagine a nine-month-old baby in sub-Saharan Africa, taken

away from his mother when his parents’ marriage dissolves. His father is a

traveling merchant, who only occasionally returns to their village. The baby is

left in the care of his paternal grandmother, a deaf-mute living in dire

poverty. His grandmother is consigned to the profoundest social isolation in a

place where illiteracy is the norm for women of her generation. Loving and

resourceful, she has invented a private sign language, which she uses to

communicate with her grandson (who, as a result, becomes preternaturally good

both at expressing himself and figuring out what others are trying to say). She

nurtures the infant on whatever milk she can barter for scavenged grain. He

starts life holding tight to a precious kernel of knowledge that will help him

throughout the harrowing years to come: there is someone on this earth who both

loves and believes in him.

Christopher Ategeka didn’t even know precisely how old he

was until he managed, on one of his business trips back to Africa, to unearth

records that established the year of his birth as 1984.

Raising His Family

By the time a child in America would just be starting the

second grade, Chris had lost both his mother and his father to HIV-AIDS. When

he was somewhere around seven years old he became the de facto head of his

household. “An age,” quips the UC Berkeley engineering graduate, “when American

children usually aren’t expected to cross the street by themselves!” He became

the eldest male in a household that included his grandmother, various other

relatives and his four step-siblings, all living together in a mud house

without electricity, plumbing or any of the luxuries taken for granted in the

developed world. Water had to be hauled by hand or carried atop one’s head,

walking for hours down dusty roads. Food was scarce and hard to come by.

Finding enough food for survival was the focus of every day. “I worked in

gardens, weeding, harvesting, lawn mowing, grazing animals and collecting trash

in exchange for food,” Chris told Yahoo Small Business, “and later started to

get paid cash.”

The youngster worked hard, both to keep himself alive and

take care of his siblings. “I started off with the help of grandma and other

relatives—then the kids were passed on to me.” With some adult helping hands,

he was able to construct a mud hut that he and his siblings could subsist in on

their own. “It’s still there today,” Chris told us with obvious pride.

Child-headed families are common in Africa because of all

the children orphaned by AIDS, malaria, cholera and now Ebola. “There are

millions of them,” says this up-and-coming star of the global service

community, “because the immediate relatives can’t afford to add five kids of

the recently passed-away relative on top of their own already over-large

family.”

When Chris was around twelve, each of the children in his

little household was sent off to live with a different relative. The uncle who

got Chris, a farmer who was none too happy to find himself with another mouth

to feed, decided to make use of his nephew as a human scarecrow. It was the job

of this child—who would, in 2014, be recognized for his global service by the United Nations—to stand

for hours in a crop field as dawn broke, throwing rocks at predatory birds,

chimpanzees and baboons, until it was time for him to set out, barefoot, on his

hours’ long walk to school.

To survive such a childhood is

amazing. To survive such a childhood to become a renowned inventor, honored at

the White House, lauded worldwide

for products that save lives and make the world a better place—well, that is

more than extraordinary.

A

Defining Incident

There was one incident, among the

myriad scenes of horror, fear and loss, that would haunt Chris forever and

become the inspiration for his career. One of his younger brothers became very

ill. Improvising a gurney of sorts from a piece of cloth, the children tried to

carry their brother to the nearest healthcare facility, which was many miles

away. He died in their arms as they struggled to get him to a doctor or nurse

who could, without doubt, have saved his life.

If only there had been a better way

to transport him, a way that would be within reach for even such a desperately

poor family as his own!

This was the moment when the seed for

CA Bikes (now called Rides for Lives),

the first of three companies founded by Chris, began to germinate inside the

sleep- and food-deprived lad whose brilliant mind was mostly taken up with the

moment-to-moment exigencies of survival.

“Talent is universal, but

opportunities are not,” says Chris, who managed to earn both his bachelor’s and

master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from the prestigious program at UC

Berkeley in record time by developing a habit he still has now of working

extraordinarily hard on very little sleep. “A seventeen-year-old computer

genius in San Francisco is not any smarter than a seventeen-year-old kid in the

jungles of Africa. They were just born on an uneven playing field.”

Y.E.S. Uganda, a church-based NGO

and orphanage, found out about Chris’s plight and offered to help him keep

going to school. And then funding came through to help one of the hundreds of

orphans in their care to follow a college prep curriculum, rather than simply

learning a trade. Chris was chosen.

Carol Adams, the founder of YES

Uganda, reported on Chris’s progress to his American benefactors, Martha and

Michael Helm. When they learned of the hike Chris had to take every day to get

to and from school, they bought him a bicycle.

What had been daunting and painful

suddenly became a matter of joyful ease. Chris used the time he saved every day

to study hard. By the time he graduated high school, the Helms sent for Chris,

now 20, so that he could live with them and attend college in California.

“I am the luckiest guy alive,” wrote

Chris on a Reddit

AMA that crashed multiple times with the outpouring of heartfelt responses

to his tale. “I am living the dream—three meals a day!”

Chris Ategeka’s ambitions didn’t stop with his own safety

and comfort. On temporary leave from his PhD program at Berkeley, he is

nurturing three high-profile startups dedicated to helping others.

Rides For Lives

One of these is San Francisco-based Rides for Lives, a

highly innovative provider since 2011 of medical services in rural Uganda, with

a field office in the country’s capital, Kampala. The company

manufactures locally sourced, specially adapted medical vehicles—many of them

designed by Chris—with the mission of improving access to medical care as well

as creating economic opportunities for the country’s most vulnerable citizens, over

86 percent of whom live in remote areas. Chris spends half the year in

Kampala overseeing the company’s operations, growing the fleet of bicycle

ambulances and an array of other two- and three-wheelers specially adapted for

the disabled. Local workers are hired and trained to manufacture these as well

as Ride for Lives’ mobile health units, refitted buses that bring a general practitioner,

a pharmacist, medicines and interventions to people without other access to

medical care. Each bus is equipped with a fully outfitted onboard lab for HIV,

malaria and cancer screening, as well as family planing services and preventive

care. Lately the company has started using customized drones to deliver

life-saving medicine to people who would not be able to get it otherwise.

Two more startups

As if this weren’t enough to keep one person busy, Chris is

co-founder with fellow Cal graduate Anwaar Al-Zireeni of a start-up

biotech firm, Privail, which is developing

point-of-care diagnostics for the early detection of infectious diseases, with

an initial focus on HIV. Their goal is to provide simple and affordable tests

that will enable patients throughout the world to take earlier action in

seeking medical treatment.

He’s also founder and partner of New Focus Africa, an intensive mentorship

and funding program designed to help mission-driven African entrepreneurs build

better products and forge the connections needed for success. “We aspire,” says

Chris, illustrating his point on a whiteboard, “to bridge the gap between the

continent and the global startup ecosystem.”

Startup and

Entrepreneurial Advice from Chris Ategeka

We asked this inspiring entrepreneur for his top three

pieces of advice for other people who have a great idea but aren’t quite sure

how to turn it into a reality. This is what he told us:

Have a clear model with concrete goals

Set timelines and organize your tasks

Start with increments: make your plans for day

1, day 5, day 10—then day 30, day 60 and day 90 before setting your 5-year goal

What is it, we wanted to know, that allowed him, despite all

his hardship, to become so successful.

“People like me,” he told us with stunning honesty, “are

driven by fear. Not so much now, because I have multiple engineering degrees

from Berkeley. But very much so for most of my journey. Fear that this new opportunity

may not last…so you want to make the best out of every inch of it before it’s

gone. Fear of letting people down—someone believed in you, sacrificed resources

to make sure that you can be somebody someday. You don’t want to mess that up!

Fear that you could go back to the hellfire you just escaped.” Chris says that

fear kept him running forward, despite all the obstacles he met along the way.

We wondered whether there’s ever a conflict for him between

making money and his overall goal of stretching out his arms to people who are

still as destitute and miserable as he once was. “You can never help the poor

if you are one of them,” he told us. “There is simply not enough philanthropic

capital or foreign aid to solve Africa’s problems, on the scale they exist, in

the foreseeable future.” He is optimistic about the potential of a bottom-up,

capacity-building approach for the future of Africa and the rest of the

developing world. “To defeat Africa’s challenges, we must harness truly

sustainable and scalable models by creating jobs for Africans—giving them the

tools to solve their own problems.”

Chris was commencement speaker for the graduating class of

engineers in 2011 at UC Berkeley. He remembers that day as one of the best

moments of his life. His grandmother, who is in her 80s now, couldn’t make it

to the ceremony—and wouldn’t have been able to hear him, of course, even if she

had. But he was able to show her the video when he came to visit her in Uganda.

There he was, all bedecked in his blue cap and gown, smiling broadly, honored

by an audience of thousands. “She was crying and very proud!” he told us.

A compelling story is essential for any entrepreneurial

venture hoping to stand out among all the millions of start-ups in the world.

We asked the founder of Rides for

Lives to offer our readers the five most important things, in his opinion,

that should be included in the origin tale of every entrepreneur. (Watch Chris’s

TED Talk to see these five elements brought to life as he tells his own

story!)

Funny—This

makes it memorable

makes it memorable Personal—This

shows your passion

shows your passion Relevant—Relate

to your audience

to your audience Authentic—Be

real, be yourself

real, be yourself Transporting—Take

the listener on a journey

Chris Ategeka has taken a long journey from the poverty and

pain of his childhood in rural Uganda to his position now as a San

Francisco-based engineer and visionary social entrepreneur. His dream, he confided,

is to connect talented young people in places where their ideas and potential

might otherwise go untapped—throughout the developing world—to sources of money

and opportunity in places where both of these are plentiful.

With the hard-won knowledge he has of both worlds, Chris

wants to dedicate his professional career to being what he calls an

“opportunity/talent catalyst”—to give

to others the gift that was given to him by people who could see beyond yet

another child doomed by poverty and hunger to a life of scant potential.

Talented young people everywhere, he passionately believes, deserve the

opportunity to focus on solving the world’s biggest problems—and the world

needs their ideas.

“This is what I would like to be remembered for,” writes this

man much given to smiling, who is still only 30 years old. “Something I will be

proud to talk about 50 years from now.” In a post-script, he added, “Let’s do

another interview then!”