What Manuela Mulondo learnt selling juice on Kampala Road

If you Google Manuela P. Mulondo and head to the Images section, you might find only one photograph of her wearing a hat. Figuratively, however, she has quite a collection.

She is a leader, entrepreneur, author, speaker and homemaker. As the founder of The Cradle and the voice behind Bump Love, APPG and DOMINATE, Mulondo wears many hats, but they all seem to hang on the same hook built around helping women grow into their purpose, strengthening their leadership and pushing them to become more intentional about the lives they build. Through her books, mentorship, courses, gatherings, and practical resources, she is creating spaces for women across Eastern Africa to learn, lead and become the women they aspire to be.

But behind the woman you meet today stands a long line of different Manuela P. Mulondos. Each one carries a story of lessons, triumphs and setbacks. And each Manuela laid a brick, slowly building the woman she is today.

There was the girl who had enough, the daughter who learnt to live without, and the woman who would find a way to make something of both.

The little girl who had enough.

She was born in Kampala and grew up in a household supported by two working parents. Her father, Joe Pacutho, was a warden at Makerere University’s Northcote Hall, now Nsibirwa Hall. Her mother, Agnes Ruteitsire, worked as a secretary in Kampala. Their jobs provided a degree of comfort, and for a young Manuela, some of life’s simplest pleasures were things she could enjoy without wondering what they cost.

There was bread, for instance. The university kitchen baked it, and five loaves could arrive at home at a time. Life would eventually teach Manuela lessons about making ends meet. But long before she had to worry about money, she already knew what to do with the ends from the five loaves and loved them, especially spread with Blue Band and placed in the oven until they turned brown and crisp.

Bread would later become a measure of how well her family was doing. “Bread has always been my indicator of having money,” she told Barrack Bukusi on Financially Incorrect. When they could no longer have it, she knew they were poor.

The household was large. Joe had 10 children, three of them with Agnes. Relatives occasionally passed through his care. He was an Alur from West Nile; Agnes was a Munyankore. Manuela has kept Pacutho, the P in her name, after marriage. It marks the family she came from and a northern Ugandan identity that the name Mulondo alone does not convey.

Manuela began school at Nakasero Nursery before proceeding to Kitante Primary. Joe valued reading, and in Primary Two, he introduced her to the Hardy Boys. It was an early introduction to the power of the written word, a medium Manuela would eventually make her own.

For a while, childhood carried on amid the familiar rhythms of a comfortable family life. It was not without ordinary family irritations and difficulties, but the family had enough to make life feel secure.

The daughter who learned to live without.

In 1997, while Mulondo was in Primary Six, Agnes was injured in an accident. Part of her right finger was severed, impairing her ability to type, a skill central to her work as a secretary. She eventually lost her job. Around the same time, Joe retired from his position as a warden at Makerere University, and the family had to vacate its university-provided accommodation. He turned to freelance graphic design, but the income was insufficient to sustain the household as before.

They moved from Makerere into a rented house in Kamwokya, the best Joe could afford. Part of its roof was open.

“My constant prayer was that it did not rain,” she recalled in Caroline Ariba’s New Vision.

But it did rain, and whenever it rained, the family would move everything to the dry side of the house.

Her parents separated. She connects her mother’s decision to leave to her conversion to Christianity. Agnes had come to believe that she should be married if she was to continue living with Joe. Their relationship had not been formalized in that way, and she felt her faith required her to walk away. Yet she never spoke ill of him to the children, Mulondo told Phionah Nassanga in a 2020 Monitor interview, allowing them to form their own relationships with their father. Her later advice to spouses is to avoid speaking ill of one another to their children. Even though the relationship had ended, the children’s relationships with their parents still needed care.

Mulondo places the family’s breakdown around the time she was in Primary Six. Agnes was now trying to support three children without a regular income, while Joe, who had seven other children to support, was struggling too.

During the vacation after Primary Seven, Agnes took the three children to the village. She did not know where else to put them, Mulondo recalled in her Financially Incorrect interview. They stayed for about a year. Manuela had imagined fruit to pick and food to dig from the ground. Instead, they arrived during a famine. Breakfast was mashed beans. Lunch was beans mixed with pumpkin. Dinner brought pumpkin and beans again. Even now, she cannot bear pumpkin.

Water was another difficult thing to obtain. In that conversation, she remembered a source also used by livestock, and the cows themselves produced little milk. Christmas and New Year did not feel different from ordinary days. She recalled occasions when she would sit outside and cry. The move intended to shelter them had brought another form of hardship.

The village took a toll on the family. In her account to Bukusi, Mulondo recalled them getting very sick. Agnes took them back to Kampala for hospital care.

Back in the city, Agnes had a friend with whom they could share a two-bedroom house, each mother and her children occupying a room. Mulondo now sees value in that arrangement for the single mothers. A home did not have to be paid for by one woman alone. They could pool money and buy basic necessities.

However, the collective arrangement depended on both households contributing, and when Agnes’ friend passed on, Mulondo and her family could not remain there.

Mulondo’s memories of the homes from those difficult years survive as fragments, including an abandoned house on Kira Road she described to Robert Kabushenga in a 2021 360Mentor conversation.

In that conversation, she recalled once returning from school to find the roof gone. Doors were removed too, and when the toilet was blocked, the family resorted to using the toilets at a nearby school. The family had nowhere else to go and little power to protest. They also once lived behind an aunt’s dairy shop in Bukoto. A single room had to serve as the kitchen, living room and bedroom. They slept across one mattress to fit. Clothes became a source of cash. A dress could be worn during the day, washed and ironed in the evening, then displayed for sale on the next day. Agnes also sought odd jobs with friends. She helped in shops and stores, only buying them some time, but none of the prospects yet gave them the security they had once known.

But amid those unsettled years, Mulondo’s education continued, supported by a combination of family effort and outside help.

Joe had kept her at Kitante Primary through Primary Seven, and she had finished with seven aggregates, results strong enough to give her a chance of entering King’s College Budo, the school she had hoped to attend. But her report card did not have an answer to who would be paying her fees. Secondary school fees were beyond her father’s means. Budo only remained as a school Mulondo wanted, as another route opened.

The Forum for African Women Educationalists, FAWE, supported academically able girls whose families could not afford their education. In her account to Bukusi, Manuela recalled scholarships aimed at girls from northern Uganda, where conflict had disrupted their lives and schooling. Her father’s West Nile origins helped her qualify, even though she had grown up mostly in Kampala. FAWE covered her fees at Our Lady of Good Counsel Gayaza. She would begin her secondary education there, but deep inside, she held on to an ambition that kept Budo on her radar.

At Our Lady, doing well took on a second purpose for Mulondo. Each year, they awarded a one-term scholarship to the student who finished above everyone else. Mulondo set her sights on this opportunity. FAWE was already paying Mulondo’s fees, and so, she thought it fitting that the additional award could help pay her brother’s fees. After winning the scholarship, she told Kabushenga that she had asked for it to be converted into cash for his tuition.

“I woke up every morning to beat the entire school so I could get that scholarship for my brother,” she said in the same 360Mentor conversation.

After four years at Our Lady and strong O-level results, Budo came within reach. FAWE extended its support, making what she described in that conversation as an exception to its usual arrangements to fund her A-level studies there.

Her ambition to attend Budo had survived the intervening years. Along the way, she had helped carry somebody else’s education.

The girl who hawked juice.

The juice business had begun years before Mulondo reached Budo, around her first year at Our Lady of Good Counsel Gayaza. At school, she was learning how far her results could take her. During the holidays, she was learning what it took to persuade somebody to part with UGX 500 (about $0.12 at today’s exchange rate).

FAWE was paying her fees, and her results could help with a brother’s tuition, but Agnes still had three children to feed, clothe and house. Around Mulondo’s first year of secondary school, her mother visited a friend who made good juice and asked how she did it. The friend showed her a blender. Agnes asked whether she had an extra one she could use. She did. With that borrowed machine, Agnes began making juice, and her children helped prepare and sell it during school holidays.

Mulondo bought mangoes at Owino Market and initially peeled them there, but a rubbish collector disrupted her logistics when they accused her of making the market dirty. She began carrying the sack to Mutaasa Kafeero Plaza, where they prepared the juice. Nearby restaurants supplied empty mineral water bottles. The family washed them with warm water and soap, then filled them for sale.

An early batch amounted to five litres, filling up 10 half-litre bottles, each selling for UGX 500 (about $0.12). Selling all 10 brought in UGX 5,000 (about $1.23), before the costs of making the drink. Those bottles carried a share of the family’s food, school fees and shelter.

Agnes insisted that they look after how the product, and its sellers, appeared. Other hawkers sold juice in plastic bags. Hers went into bottles. Her children’s clothes had to be clean, and they had to look tidy. Money was scarce, but she continued to bargain for good clothes at Owino, the clothes market. She held on to standards that the children carried even when money was scarce.

During the school term, Mulondo worked towards the school’s annual award for its best-performing student. During the holidays, she worked towards selling the day’s juice, with both efforts reaching beyond her own needs.

On Kampala Road, the selling had its own timetable. She recalled on Financially Incorrect having roughly an hour, between one and two in the afternoon, to reach people while they were eating and would want a drink with their meal. Arrive after somebody had bought water or soda, and a possible sale was already lost.

Mulondo first tried motorists, with little success. She came to learn that the stronger market was on the pavement. Men selling novels along Kampala Road bought from her and recommended her to others. She told Kabushenga that she had sold 20 bottles to the booksellers and had to fetch more. Word travelled along the street, towards a post office nearby, and Radio One’s premises. She ventured further into more streets, such as Jinja Road, that led to small offices, where she also began selling.

The booksellers called her Katunda, a nickname derived from matunda, the Swahili word for fruits. Some people still call her by that name. She has kept an affection for the name because it reminds her of the work and the values she learnt there.

But again, the business wasn’t a simple one plus one equals two. It also depended on things that effort could not always settle. On a cold, rainy day, she could find herself offering an icy drink to people who wanted something warm. Mangoes came into season and went out again. Through all that, the family’s expenses persisted, and so did their will to get through each day.

Refusal acquired a weight Mulondo had not known as a small child. A parent refusing a toy was one kind of disappointment. A stranger refusing the bottle that would later pay for dinner was a different kind of denial.

Mulondo upped her game. She dressed well and learnt to express herself more clearly, hoping to give buyers fewer reasons to turn her away. As she learnt to attract customers, she also had to manage attention that came with other intentions. Some men offered money as though it might persuade her to abandon the work and become their girlfriend or wife. Others treated her with disrespect. She spoke up against their assumptions and learnt to avoid places where she expected harassment.

Agnes had warned her that beauty could be both an advantage and a burden. Manuela would have to work harder to show that what she possessed came from her labour. Her older sister, Amanda Onapito, had begun preparing her for that attention early. In Senior One, Mulondo went on her first date. It was Amanda who took her to a place in Wandegeya, explaining that she did not want men to exploit her through such experiences.

By the end of her O-level years, the schoolgirl and the juice seller could meet at the same moment. Her Senior Four teacher once found her on Kampala Road, arguing over an unpaid bottle. In 360Mentor, she remembered him recognising her and telling her she had topped Wakiso district. The teacher settled the customer’s outstanding money. Mulondo went home to deliver the good news to her mother, and they spent the day celebrating.

Those results helped take her to Budo for Senior Five and Senior Six, with FAWE continuing to support her. The juice business grew alongside that progress. An uncle suggested approaching larger offices.

With a little bit of division of labour, Agnes found customers at Uganda Telecom while Mulondo sold at MTN. Her siblings supplied other organisations in the area. By the time she finished high school, the family had already expanded into corporate sales.

The new customers changed the scale of the work. Bottles gave way to five-litre jerricans and disposable cups. Mulondo packed the containers upright into sturdy bags and carried them on her back, selling juice across floors of the MTN building. Recalling the work to Bukusi, she remembered jeans, a smart top and high heels. She also remembered falling on the stairs.

Agnes was saving as the family earned. If somebody gave her a lift, she put aside the fare. When a scholarship covered school fees, she continued to raise the amount she would otherwise have needed to pay. Mulondo watched and learnt from her mother to treat a cost avoided as money to keep.

That financial discipline, along with the effort placed in their juice business, brought them to their first house.

Agnes bought land and began building a home. The foundation went in, then walls, then a roof. They moved in before it was finished. The windows could wait. They covered the openings with cardboard. One room had a finished floor; elsewhere, grass grew inside. But the family had somewhere they could call home and a roof over their heads.

The juice business followed Mulondo to Makerere University. Government sponsorship covered her studies, and she eventually settled on statistics and psychology. She wanted to understand how people’s minds worked. Agnes, who had spent years finding ways to keep her children in school, gave her daughter room to choose what interested her.

Outside class, Mulondo continued supplying juice. The family’s customers now included companies and functions, and Agnes bought a car to help with deliveries. Its windows would not open, and there was no air conditioning. They left home with frozen juice and watched it thaw in the heat as they travelled.

Still, they had a car, and Mulondo began using it at university as she learnt to drive.

She also helped at her mother’s telephone booth, where customers paid to make calls using the operator’s phone. Small telephone businesses could sell airtime too, and some offered handset charging. Among the customers who came through, Mulondo noticed worn phone covers and saw an opportunity. She began selling replacements and airtime, including from her room on campus. Each small margin put money of her own within reach. On Financially Incorrect, she recalled answering men who asked whether she needed money, “No, I have money.” She could pay for a call, meet a small expense and carry on without asking somebody to provide for her. Those earnings gave her a firmer footing in the attention she received. She could consider the person approaching her with her immediate needs already covered. Through these small businesses, she was beginning to exercise a power she would come to value and teach other women to hone: providing for herself and choosing for herself.

University was also bringing her into experiences beyond the work she knew. In 2007, she paid UGX 50,000 (about $12) for a bus trip to Kenya, her first journey abroad. It was a two-week Christian ministry trip. She packed three pairs of jeans and three T-shirts. Other women arrived with sheets, soap, towels, perfume and handbags. In her 2020 Monitor interview, she recalled the trip as a moment when she began learning to live as a lady.

Brian Mulondo noticed her there. He remembers her beauty, her fluent English and his uncertainty about how to approach her. Once they began talking, he found a woman who was sincere, funny, ambitious and serious about her faith. He told her he intended to marry her.

That declaration would take years to become a household. For the moment, Mulondo was studying, selling and discovering what she could provide for herself.

By the time she completed university, the family had begun to recover some of the security they had lost. Agnes had turned borrowed equipment, her children’s labour and money carefully put aside into land and a home. Mulondo was still living under her mother’s roof, but she was beginning to ask what she would build beyond it.

The woman who found a way to build a life of her own.

Mulondo graduated from Makerere University with a Bachelor of Science in statistics and psychology in 2008. By then, Agnes had built the family a home, and the juice business had helped carry them through years of uncertainty. Mulondo had also begun earning money of her own through her small ventures on campus. She was still living at home, but she felt it was time to build on what her mother had made possible and find her own direction.

Her first job took her to People Performance Group, a human-resource consultancy, where she worked as an account manager. She earned commissions from recruitment and training business she brought into the firm. Years of selling juice had taught her to approach strangers, explain her product and persist through rejection. She now had to learn how to turn those skills into contracts with companies.

A thirsty customer could decide on a bottle at lunchtime. Persuading a company to buy recruitment or training services demanded something different, and she recalled struggling to earn commissions in her account to Bukusi. Then a substantial client deal came through. She received a commission of UGX 5 million (about $1,230), and she and Brian bought a blue Toyota Corsa. After years of carrying juice and travelling in the family’s uncomfortable delivery car, she had her own first car.

Around that period, an invitation to work at Watoto Church gave her another direction. She left the consultancy and became creative director of the children’s ministry. The work brought a regular salary, with money deducted directly for savings before the balance reached her. Still living at home, she could put some of what remained into businesses of her own.

She bought clothes downtown to resell. But stock could wait longer than fashion did. By the time a customer appreciated something she had bought, its season might already have passed. Money went back into the business without producing much more than a little extra to live on.

A salary had given her a measure of predictability. It had also given her room to ask a question that earning the next day’s money had often crowded out.

What was she meant to do with her life?

“Lord, what do I do with who I am and what I have?” she recalled asking in her Financially Incorrect conversation.

She explored several answers during her twenties. She auditioned for Idols, convinced she had a beautiful voice. The judges disagreed and suggested modelling. When she tried that, she was told she was too short; acne complicated the possibility of modelling her face. Acting brought some gigs, but she never became the leading actress she had imagined.

She laughed at those attempts during that interview. At the time, each was another possibility to pursue, another place where she might discover what she could do well enough to make a life from it.

At Watoto, meanwhile, her work with children was giving that search a more definite direction. She wanted to create an experiential learning centre: a place where children could learn through seeing, trying and doing. The idea grew alongside the work she was already doing with them.

About three years into the job, Mulondo spotted a newspaper notice for Inspire Africa, a business competition with a $50,000 prize. She had been trying small ventures on the side, but the prize offered the possibility of thinking bigger. Perhaps this was the money that could move her idea of a children’s centre from imagination to reality.

She competed in 2012 and made it to the final three. The $50,000 went to someone else, but Mulondo did not leave empty-handed. Amos Wekesa, the Ugandan tourism entrepreneur behind Great Lakes Safaris and Uganda Lodges, gave her $5,000 to support her idea. She put the money aside while she worked out her next move.

The competition, however, had another prize in store, one that had nothing to do with the judging panel.

One of the tasks required contestants to approach companies for event sponsorship. Mulondo took her pitch to Bank of Africa. She went in looking for corporate support and caught the chief executive’s attention instead. Before long, the conversation had moved from sponsorship to employment. After the competition, the bank called her in as its brand manager.

She had entered looking for money to build a business. She left with some seed capital, a new professional opening and, eventually, another question to answer about what she wanted to build.

She moved from Watoto into a brand manager role. The work she had done before university belonged on her CV, too. Selling juice, approaching customers and finding new markets had been experience she could bring into a marketing job.

The bank offered better pay and a professional standing she enjoyed. She recalled the suits and the high heels to Bukusi, including expensive shoes with red soles. She wanted to look like somebody who worked where the money was. Credit was accessible too, and each month’s income could arrive with spending from the previous month already waiting for it.

Her earnings were growing, but her understanding of how to keep them was developing more slowly.

Brian had been moving through money differently. While working in travel at Watoto, he ate the food available instead of paying for another meal. He sometimes walked to save transport fares. On one date, he took Mulondo walking. She told Bukusi she had been bored and wondered why he would make a girl walk like that.

He was keeping the difference between what he earned and what he spent. She had yet to understand what that difference could do for them.

They married in 2012, during the same period in which her career was changing. Their friendship had grown through the years since Kenya, and his humour remained part of what drew her to him. However, their approaches to money would take longer to reconcile.

Six months after the wedding, she became pregnant, Mulondo told Kabushenga in a 360Mentor conversation. She was working at Bank of Africa, building her career and preparing for their first child. Her spending expanded to the baby. She wanted a circular cot made specially, another purchase she could now afford to consider.

Preparing for his arrival also meant accounting for the hours she would spend away from him. During campaigns, she could work 12 hours at the bank. Somebody else would occupy a substantial part of her child’s day, somebody whose attention, habits and choices would help shape the little boy.

“Who was going to raise him?” she recalled wondering on Financially Incorrect.

The question took her to daycare centres. Her years working with children at Watoto had given her expectations of what adults could bring to those early years. They could talk with children, join their play and guide their learning. In some of the centres she visited, she recalled in that interview, caregivers sat while children played by themselves.

At Watoto, she had imagined building a place where children could learn by doing, exploring the world rather than simply being taught about it. Pregnancy brought that ambition home. She wanted to keep growing at the bank, but she also wanted her son’s days to be filled with the kind of care and learning she would have chosen for him herself. The search for childcare became a search for something she had once hoped to offer other people’s children. Now, she needed to find it for her own.

The concern extended beyond her own household. She had heard other mothers describe the difficulty of trusting somebody with their children while they worked. One friend had decided to stop working until she was finished having children. A career could be interrupted because a mother could not find care she trusted.

Mulondo wanted to keep developing hers. She also wanted confidence in how her child would spend the hours she was away.

One day, after another frustrating search, she came home to Brian. He reminded her of the $5,000 she had put aside. Why not use it to create the place she was looking for?

The competition money had been waiting for an opportunity. Motherhood had given it a purpose she could name. In 2014, she founded The Cradle.

Before designing the programme, she brought working mothers into the conversation. Through focus groups involving about 100 career mothers, she asked what they would want their children to know and become if they could shape their care.

Their answers covered intellectual development, physical growth, character and spirituality. She built those concerns into a play-based curriculum.

The place she had imagined for her son now had a programme other children could share. But finding those children proved difficult.

For the first six months, her son remained the only client.

Parents had to understand what she was offering and why it cost what it did. A centre needed people to care for the children, premises to house them and enough paying families to sustain the work. Her conviction about what children needed had brought her this far. She now had to make that value clear to somebody choosing where to spend their money.

She spent the early years explaining the service, speaking about childcare and encouraging parents to consider it when maternity leave ended. Fees were initially lower than she later judged the business could sustain. As families joined, the centre grew.

By November 2018, The Cradle in Ntinda was open day and night, and Mulondo told The Observer that 300 to 400 children had passed through it. A painted road helped children learn road use. A vegetable garden introduced them to plant life. There were spaces for play, books, colours and shapes. These were everyday opportunities for the engagement she had wanted while searching for care.

As the business developed, she brought in shareholders to help it grow and strengthen accountability. She was also asking employers to take a greater share of responsibility for care.

When the hats got too heavy.

As The Cradle grew, Mulondo began asking who else could help make that care available. Employers benefited when a mother could concentrate on her work. They could provide space for a centre, contribute to fees or arrange access to care off-site.

She knew the connection from her own working day. A campaign at the bank required her attention, while her son needed somebody else’s. Dependable care made room for both. The centre she had created for him gave her something concrete to offer other mothers facing the same difficulty.

But making the service available also meant explaining its value. Parents had to understand what their children would receive. Employers had to see how care outside the office affected the work happening inside it. Building The Cradle drew Mulondo into conversations that reached beyond its gates.

She began speaking about the conditions women needed to pursue their careers and raise their families. Her own experience gave those arguments a practical foundation: she had worked the long hours, searched for care and then spent years trying to make a centre sustainable.

That work was already bringing her into wider circles. In 2017, she became a Mandela Washington Fellow. The following year, she joined the Obama Foundation’s Leaders Africa programme, where she introduced and met Barack Obama. The woman who had been explaining childcare to prospective customers was carrying those concerns into international conversations about leadership and opportunity.

Alongside that advocacy, she was finding other ways to engage families. With Rachael A. Mwine, conversations about motherhood developed into Bump Love, a series on NTV Uganda from 2019, bringing together mothers whose different experiences gave others something to learn from. Her interest in children’s reasoning became Stop, Listen to Your Child Think, developed through a writing assignment at Harvest Institute in 2019.

A centre could care for the children enrolled there. A book or broadcast could reach parents she might never meet. Her work was entering more households, and her name was becoming familiar beyond the families who paid The Cradle’s fees.

Eventually, people wanted her at events, wanted her advice and wanted to hear her story. Accepting meant finding time in a life that already contained a business, a marriage and two young children.

Keeping up with that public life consumed money and time. A speaking engagement could pay nothing and still require fuel and clothes. The Cradle covered those expenses, along with personal needs and help she wanted to give others. A staff member struggling with rent could become another obligation she took on. Money moved between the business and her pocket without enough provision for what either would need next.

She had expected meeting Obama to bring more attention and funding to the business. In her recollection, the anticipated lift never came.

“The world is celebrating you, but there’s nothing to show of it,” she told Bukusi on Financially Incorrect. “Not in your bank account, not even in your emotional account.”

At home, she was exhausted. In that interview, she described depression, arguments with Brian and the feeling that she was giving too little to each part of a life that demanded so much. Her children were young. She was helping other women think about their families while struggling to give her own the attention she wanted them to have.

After three days without sleep, she wrote down the thoughts crowding her mind and prayed for help.

She recalled a vision of her funeral in the same interview. People had come in great numbers, remembering speeches, broadcasts and conversations that had changed their lives. Then her attention moved to Brian and their two children. They seemed unfamiliar with the woman everybody else was describing.

The vision confronted her with the distance between the life people applauded and the life her family experienced.

She withdrew from speaking engagements and concentrated on home. For roughly two years, she told Bukusi, she stayed away from The Cradle’s office while its team continued running the business. She remained involved in approvals. Letting other people do the work gave her time to attend to responsibilities she had been trying to carry alongside everything else.

She began making arrangements for her days, her household and her money. In 2019, she read Money Cure by Barbara Katende. A financial programme at church gave her further instruction. She was learning to decide what income would do before another expense arrived to claim it.

The pandemic tested that learning. The Cradle’s income fell when children could no longer come to the centre. Mulondo needed money for the business and for herself.

Brian had savings. He could support their household and help other people, too. The man who had once taken her walking to save money had kept building a reserve she had not understood.

She remembered being humbled in her Financially Incorrect conversation. She asked him to teach her.

Alongside that financial learning, Mulondo had begun setting aside time for annual retreats to plan her life. She was trying to give her home, work and money a structure she could sustain. Time away allowed her to think and pray about the year ahead, decide what needed attention and make provision for it before everyday demands took over again.

During one retreat, a friend asked to visit. Mulondo told her she would have to join her there. The friend packed her bags and came.

Mulondo took her through the process she was using to organise her life. What had begun as a response to exhaustion was becoming a method she could explain to somebody else.

“We don’t know these things. I would pay for this,” Mulondo remembered her friend telling her in her account to Bukusi.

She was offering to pay for guidance in stepping back from daily demands, working through her own priorities and making a plan for the coming year. The approach would become the foundation of the Annual Personal Planning Getaway, or APPG, where participants reflect on the year behind them and plan across their relationships, finances, work, family and personal growth.

Mulondo had been using the retreats to find direction for herself. Her friend saw somebody who could help others find theirs.

In 2020, she held the first APPG. About 30 people paid $300 each, she recalled in the same conversation. She could earn by teaching something she had worked through herself.

The childcare business was under financial pressure, but her planning method had attracted paying customers. APPG gave her a source of income separate from The Cradle. She could earn from helping people organise their lives, drawing on work she had first done to put her own in order.

The same friend, who became an accountability partner, noticed another resource in Mulondo’s home. Using combinations and permutations, she had created a menu that could run for a year without repeating the same combination of meals. She had already used it in her household. Her friend urged her to sell it.

Mulondo began selling meal plans and, in Financially Incorrect, recalled sales of roughly UGX 50 million (about $12,300) during the pandemic. Recipes, shopping lists, cleaning schedules and children’s chore plans followed.

There was a familiar instinct at work. At her mother’s telephone booth, worn phone covers had suggested something she could sell. Now, the recurring demands inside a home were revealing another market. She could recognise a need because she had lived with it.

Speaking began to pay, too. In that interview, she recalled offers of $1,000, $2,000 and $3,000 for engagements, sums that initially made her wonder whether she should accept them. The knowledge people had applauded could also support the person providing it.

Through Brandivas, which she co-founded with Doreen Muhereza, she extended that work to others. She helped people develop their personal brands, communicate what they knew and earn from their expertise.

More income gave her room to settle obligations she had accumulated. On Financially Incorrect, she estimated her combined business and personal debt at around UGX 150 million (about $36,900). She listed the creditors, began with smaller debts and made plans for the larger ones. She said she eventually cleared them.

She also gave generosity a place in her budget. An early allocation set aside 20% for saving and 10% for giving, alongside money for tithing, debt and living costs. When the giving allocation was finished, another appeal could wait. Somebody else’s emergency no longer had to consume money already committed to her household or business.

Faith remained central to those decisions. She regarded income as something God had entrusted to her. Joseph storing grain during years of plenty informed her decision to save a fifth. She was learning to make provision while she had the means.

Her investing had begun in 2019, when, she told Bukusi, she had UGX 240,000 (about $59) and was seeking advice about government investments. She increased her contributions over time. Her later arrangements include bonds, unit trusts and retirement savings.

Buying government debt gave her particular satisfaction. The biblical promise that she would lend to nations had acquired a practical meaning. She could lend to Uganda.

In that conversation, she acknowledged difficulty reproducing the calculations behind investment returns. She continues contributing, seeking advice and reinvesting. Her progress has included accepting that she can learn something well enough to act while still having more to understand.

The woman teaching women to dominate.

The girl who had enough, the daughter who learnt to live without, the girl who hawked juice and the woman who built a life of her own all left their mark. Now, their lessons have become something she could pass on.

On campus, having money of her own had given Mulondo the confidence to make her own choices. With a business, a marriage and children, she had learnt how much work went into sustaining that freedom. She needed to earn, save, settle debts and decide how much she could give without leaving another responsibility unattended.

Her own life had required her to learn those things, sometimes painfully. As she found ways to practise them, she also found women who needed help working through the same demands. The experience she had gathered was becoming an education she could offer.

Learning to organise those responsibilities had also given her something to teach. A household menu became a product. Her private planning retreats became gatherings where other people could work through their lives. Experience building The Cradle became instruction for somebody preparing to open a childcare business.

Through her academy, she offers courses in parenting, purpose and personal branding, household toolkits and mentorship programmes for small groups of women. She was making the lessons of her own life available to women facing familiar questions about theirs.

There was a connection between those seemingly different offerings. A mother who trusted her child’s caregiver could concentrate at work. A woman who planned her household could delegate some of its recurring demands. Somebody who recognised the value of her knowledge could begin charging for it. Each arrangement could give a woman greater room to develop her abilities and decide where to take them.

Mulondo had spent years finding that room for herself. Her teaching now challenged other women to claim it too.

That challenge has a major public platform in DOMINATE.

Through DOMINATE, Mulondo took on the work of convening a women’s conference of her own. She brought together speakers, sought sponsors and assembled a team to organise the gathering.

The conference carried concerns that had followed her through motherhood, business and the rebuilding of her own household. She wanted women to develop their God-given abilities while caring for their families and raising children who could help shape Africa’s future. Her ambition for women included the different responsibilities she had struggled to hold together herself.

She described DOMINATE as ministry on Financially Incorrect. Her digital products and planning getaways are major sources of income; the conference gives her a setting in which to teach, challenge and encourage women alongside other speakers.

On 12 April 2025, women gathered at the Kampala Serena Hotel, at an event powered by I&M Bank Uganda, to talk about faith, purpose and the demands of their personal and professional lives. The programme drew on experience across business, leadership, health and family life.

Nearly a year later, on 28 March 2026, DOMINATE moved to Lugogo Cricket Oval under the theme “The Tide Is Turning." Ahead of the gathering, Mulondo encouraged women facing resistance in their careers, businesses, marriages and personal growth. She urged them to see their difficulties not simply as obstacles, but as preparation for what lay ahead.

The 2026 edition also drew criticism online after it was promoted around women dominating in life while remaining submissive in marriage, and the broadcaster Flavia Tumusiime withdrew as a speaker. The organisers argued that submission is widely practised at work and in church and is misunderstood only when applied to marriage.

Among the partners supporting the gathering was MTN Uganda.

Years earlier, Mulondo had climbed the stairs of MTN’s offices carrying jerricans of juice on her back. Employees bought from her, helping a small family business find its feet. Now, she was convening a gathering of women, and MTN was helping to make it happen.

The woman who once climbed those stairs to sell had returned, in a sense, with something else to offer. The juice had helped her family business grow. Today, she is building a platform to help other women grow into their own ambitions. The climb had changed; so had the woman.

The distance between those two scenes is measured in more than years. Along the way, she learnt to turn ideas into businesses, knowledge into income and good intentions into plans. She also learnt that earning money was only half the work. Keeping it, growing it and knowing when not to give it away required a different kind of discipline.

Today, those lessons run through her courses, personal planning getaways, household resources and mentorship programmes. At DOMINATE, she brings them into a larger conversation about women’s work, leadership, money and purpose. The aim is to send the women in the room out ready to act on what they have learnt.

At the 2025 edition, she left her audience with a challenge.

“The worst thing you can do is leave this room and do nothing,” she said, according to I&M Bank’s account of the 2025 event.

It is an instruction from a woman who began by selling juice, learnt the hard way what it takes to build something that lasts, and now teaches other women to do the same. The girl who once hawked juice is now teaching women to dominate. The next move is theirs.