Miklah Story: How Miklah and its Founders Got Here!

In July 2014, out of curiosity and my desire to write or create, I launched a blog using Google’s Blogger (who still remembers ‘Blogger’?). The blog was called The Complete You Project! After a year, I renamed it to The Complete You Ministry. No big change, right?

My lifelong passion has always been ‘fulfilled living’. While my childhood life was characterized by a serious lack of basic life resources like food, shelter, education, and healthcare, I somehow held on to the belief that life, true life, is more than material stuff or numbers or quantitative scores. Even as a child, I believed in a balanced life; life in fullness, not lacking in all its aspects! That is what inspired the above long names bearing the words ‘Complete You’.

In 2019, I saw a life-changing advert on TV; Total Uganda was looking for innovative ideas for 2019. With my curiosity, I jumped in! Out of everything I had read and written about complete living across various domains, I came up with a weird idea: BARTER TRADE! Yes, I was going to revive barter trade, this time not through physical meet-ups and bartering items, but online-enabled swapping – a phone for a laptop, a car for a wife (kidding), a skill for a skill, a service for a service. The idea was, give what you have and do not like or need in exchange for what you need or like that others do not need or like! Cool, right? I named it SWAPafrica – Buy Without Money!

During my blogging with Blogger, I had come across #WordPress and its greatness. However, I had not given it much attention since I was still comfortable with Blogger with my then-new customized domain, nemvicx.com (somebody is holding this domain hostage; it is no longer available, lol). Anyway, I had met a friend, Isaack, whom I approached for financial support. I wanted to buy a domain name for SWAPafrica, pay for WordPress webhosting, and do the design myself! Isaack gave me 300k. I always include him in this story, and I hope he appreciates his space in my life.

For two weeks, I designed the barter trade platform using WordPress for the first time. I would design and then delete, design and then delete, for two weeks, struggling to make an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). YouTube was my teacher. Well, after two weeks, I had something! The web address was swapafrica.net. I registered for the #TotalStartupper Challenge 2019.

Ladies and gentlemen, I made it, I mean, we made it, for as you can see, we never make anything alone! Following 5 days of an intense Total-funded bootcamp in Jinja under #Intelligent-Performance (Do you guys know a coach called Phill Kambe?), we pitched our innovation to a serious jury at #SheltonHotel, and #SWAPafrica, the barter trade platform, emerged among the winners!

We were funded, promoted, and praised. Our name and business were put on billboards around town, and our innovation cheered on. With this support, we went official. The Complete You Ministry adopted the Hebrew name, MIKLAH (which still means complete, perfect, fulfilled), and the slogan became ‘Your Life in Fullness’. We moved from home to our first business office, incorporated our company, and made our first little income. We became MIKLAH LIFE, the tech-driven, sustainability-focused center for innovations, training, and entrepreneurship. SWAPafrica project later drowned into the COVID-19 saga (a story for another day), but #MiklahLife is still on the move. Read about us today at https://miklahlife.com/about.

I like to go back to these stories to remind myself, or even you, that you may not be where you wanna be, but you surely have moved from a point. Appreciate the little that you have become. Thank you.