Building Platforms for African Storytellers | The Muwado Journey | Roland Byagaba's Story

Once upon a time in 2013, I’m sitting in my modest Kampala office on Nkurumah road, wrestling with a big question. I have loved stories since childhood and social media was helping me rediscover my love for telling them. As an early adopter, my profile as a digital storyteller is growing on all these new social media platforms. I’m scrolling through the feeds, seeing mine and other African stories, rich with culture and creativity flourishing on platforms owned far us. It hit me: Why are we pouring our energy into spaces that profit without giving back to us? The math wasn’t mathing right. As we soon learnt, if the service is free, you are the product and out attention was being sold with us getting nothing.

This was my youthful phase when I was energetic and doing anything and everything that came to mind so, without overthinking it, I launched Muwado as an online platform to reclaim our narratives and lift up our storytellers. It helped that my professional career is IT so start-up costs were low.

The Muwado journey has had many twists and turns. It started as my personal blog to capture the African experience empower myself first. Charity begins at home. Scaling ambitions kicked in and I invited other storytellers to join. By 2015, I had turned it into an open social platform, welcoming storytellers from across Africa to join and connect through our stories. But soon, the sustainability challenges surfaced: contributors needed income, and my limited resources couldn’t keep up. We had managed to curate a wide variety of relatable stories from across Africa but had nothing to give apart from community and ‘exposure’. Had I bitten off more than I could chew?

Understandably, some members lost steam and fell off, but enough kept on submitting for the love of storytelling. I remember Liza, a young Kenyan creative in particular who when I reached out after she hadn’t posted in a while, said I was no different from the other platforms. Investor and partnership rejections and technical hiccups after a 2019 relaunch tested my resolve. I joined most of the people I’ve told about this idea in questioning whether one big-headed Africans resource-less vision could stand against global giants. I also took breaks to go and do ‘real’ jobs. But the problem kept on eating at me: many of our stories and storytellers risked staying undervalued unless we found a way to make this sustainable.

The tide turned in 2022 with a UNDP grant, giving us the boost to rebuild. A grant specifically for the creative industry. This is important because there hadn’t been that much support for creative media projects in traditional funding spaces. We introduced gifting options, ad revenue sharing features, and a customisable newsletter.

Our second leap came in 2025 with the Art of Commercial Storytelling Webinars, backed by the African Culture Fund. These eight weeks trained our growing community of creators to hone their storytelling skills with the help of capable facilitators and feedback from other participants. At the end of last month, we sent out our first payout of ad revenue share notifications - small amounts, but a major milestone. Liza, the Kenyan creative from earlier, reached out after the notifications went out to say she was paying attention again and would resume sharing. The community’s optimism is cautiously rising now as the idea takes shape. Our industry is brutal. My own shift came from embracing those early struggles, turning them into a collective strength.

The takeaway I want you to hold onto is this: We are the ones with the power to shape our storytelling future. In this digital age, platforms like Selar, Wowzi, SemaBox, Stream East, Leo Africa Griots, Media Challenge Initiative... that share our mission to amplify African voices and address our specific needs are critical. Think about the number of opportunities mobile money created. So, fund us, advertise with us.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. With AI reshaping industries and global platforms dominating, if we don’t step up now, our voices will be sidelined as they have been historically, and our creators will continue sharing scraps from the global creative economy pie.

The small payouts on Muwado are just the beginning; scaling ad sales and encouraging a culture of digital gifting to support our griots will sustain this movement. It’s our generational duty to ensure creators thrive, connecting individual efforts to a broader impact. The next generation shouldn’t have to hear go and get a real job when they want to pursue their creativity. Support African platforms. Invest in African stories. Be part of the economy that tells our future. If not us, who? If not now, when?