Zakia Kulabako has big plans for rugby in Uganda and she hopes her time on the Capgemini Women in Rugby Leadership Programme can help turn them into reality.
Kulabako never laced up a pair of rugby boots as a player but her passion for the game dates to 2008, when she became team manager of KOBs, one of the oldest clubs in her homeland.
It started a love affair that burns bright today, and it is one that she is keen to share with her fellow countrymen and women.
Kulabako is determined to help increase the popularity of the oval-ball game in the East African country and would like it to become Uganda’s national sport one day.
Through her work with the Uganda Rugby Union (URU), of which she is an executive committee member, she is helping to get the game played in more schools.
“I would love it to be like New Zealand where shops close when there’s a rugby game,” Kulabako told World Rugby.
“We are in competition with football in our country but at least the advantage is there's a football pitch in almost every school, in every district in our country.
“A football pitch can easily be transformed into a rugby pitch, so our aim is to give enough rugby balls to all these schools and eventually we will grow the numbers.
“It will work, I know it will.”
Kulabako applied twice unsuccessfully before being accepted onto the Capgemini Women in Rugby Leadership Programme and says she was “really proud” when she received the good news at the start of 2023 given her lack of playing experience.
“There were so many applications for the scholarship and then so many countries to consider, and so many other things,” she said.
“To get a chance to be part of this scholarship against all those odds; the fact that I’ve never played the game. I just love the game.
“It was something that I really, really value and I’m really proud and was so excited for. Also, for Uganda to have its second person chosen for the scholarship, it was really a big thing for us.”
Kulabako has been able to call on the advice and support of scholarship alumni Regina Lunyolo, the first Ugandan to participate in the programme, who she says was the person who recognised her administrative potential.
Lunyolo, Kulabako says, “held my hand through it all” as she transitioned from being a team manager to using her background in business to bring commercial sponsorship into the sport.
Kulabako is a business, events and asset manager by day and that experience has proved vital to her work in rugby.
But that impressive skill set has been broadened still further thanks to the access to the Capgemini University she has gained through the Capgemini Women in Rugby Leadership Programme.
Kulabako has completed several online courses, including in project management and financial management, and has acquired skills that have translated into her professional life.
“I have actually applied them to my actual current work,” she explained. “Everything I learned, I'm now implementing here at work because I work with events and sports at the company that I'm in.
“So, it has helped me move from one level to another.”
That is the type of positive journey that Kulabako also wants to help rugby in Uganda itself embark on.
And to that end, she has ambitious ideas of what can be achieved in the African country, including setting up a women’s franchise competition.
Those goals have been expanded and refined in consultation with the Capgemini Women in Rugby Leadership Programme alumni she has met.
“It has been helpful listening to people who are in countries who are doing well, like Moana [Leilua] and Maria [Samson],” Kulabako said. “They are people who have done a lot with little or less.
“Then I met Barbara Pichot. Barbara is amazing, she taught us how to do something which we’ve implemented by creating 10s and 12s to try and have more playing platforms for the women in terms of creating retention and it has actually helped.
“We had a 10s tournament recently. There was a beach rugby tournament that Regina and I have organised together.
“So, you find that there are things that that we are doing that are not exactly within the [URU] calendar, but they are contributing to the growth of the game.”
Ultimately, Kulabako’s aim is to “to have as much rugby being played throughout the year” in the hope that it will grow the playing population of Uganda.
Whether that holds true only time will tell, but Kulabako is confident the work being put in by herself and her programme peers will eventually bear fruit.
“I know that with the ideas that we keep sharing on the groups and that we keep coming up with, I know we will do a lot,” she insisted.
That feeling was heightened by her trip to Paris for the Capgemini Women in Rugby Leadership Summit in October 2023 – “an amazing experience” – and traces its roots to the very reason she first fell in love with the game.
Back in 2008 it was the camaraderie on offer on the rugby pitch that convinced Kulabako to devote her life to it, and that remains a particular pull today.
“You’re literally enemies in those 80 minutes but the moment the final whistle is blown, there’s a brotherhood that shows up,” she said.
“That’s amazing. I don't see it in in other sports, to be honest. At the end of the day, when we are off the pitch, we are brothers.
“At that point we are family, we sit together, we celebrate together. Even if I have lost, we help each other. There's a lot that happens that people take for granted but in rugby it's celebrated and that's what I love.
“I love the fact that rugby's bigger than all of us. It's bigger than any one single person. That's very powerful for me.”
