Head of Brand & Marketing @stanbicug. Passionate about maternal health, sustainable finance and paying it forward. Opinions are my own.
Kampala - The World
Joined September 2013
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Every step has taught me so much.
#MondayMotivation
What has your career path looked like? How did you get to where you are?
I'll start:
1. Waiter/Cashier
2. Office Attendant
3. Web Developer/Graphics Designer
4. Entrepreneur (web solutions)
5. Entrepreneur (VFX studio)
6. Entrepreneur (social enterprise)
This video offers practical advice I can attest to for anyone - especially women - climbing the corporate ladder.
Key takeaways:
- Being the hardest-working woman in the room doesn't mean you're the highest paid. Learn to negotiate and advocate for yourself.
- Build relationships before you need favours. The right relationships open doors that your CV alone cannot.
- Don’t confuse access with opportunity. Just because you're in the room doesn't mean they intend to give you a seat at the table. Learn the difference between being included and being empowered.
- Learn the language of money. Understand profits, margins, investments, tax credits, equity, and cash flow.
Helen Nangonzi retweeted
May we all experience financial freedom. The kind where paying bills isn't a monthly crisis, helping family doesn't leave you struggling, and enjoying life doesn't come with guilt.
Helen Nangonzi retweeted
Join us in welcoming @HNangonzi as our new Head of Brand & Marketing.
#WelcomeHellen
I walk into @stanbicug as it celebrates 35 years of growing alongside Uganda.
I look forward to working with the team to further advance the Bank’s Positive Impact - which aims to empower women, youth, and farmers through financial inclusion, enterprise development, climate resilience, infrastructure development, and corporate social investment.
I am particularly excited about the work being done around maternal health - a topic I am deeply passionate about.
A big thank you to the team at the Big Blue for the warm welcome!
Helen Nangonzi retweeted
Farewells are tough.
An inspiration to all of us!
You led with warmth and tact.
Thank you, Helen.
We wish you the best in your journey!
A new journey begins.
Today will be my last day at @AbsaUganda and I look back at my journey with immense pride and gratitude.
I stepped into the role at the pivotal moment of transition from Barclays to Absa. We were handed a young brand, coming off a legacy that had been in existence in Uganda for over 90 years, and we managed to build it into one of the strongest and most recognisable brands in the country.
We worked to greatly improve the customer experience - a feat we achieved by treating every client interaction with empathy and by recognising the critical role our colleagues play in creating memorable experiences for our clients.
We also focused on ensuring the team achieved real growth by enriching their roles and empowering them to earn and save more.
To the amazing team at Absa Uganda: thank you for your relentless dedication, your innovative spirit, and above all, for the growth you have demonstrated among yourselves and triggered within me.
To the leadership team, thank you @DavidAWandera, Rick de Kock and Sydney Mbhele for your candour, steer and support.
Here’s to taking on new challenges and the constant pursuit of growth.
A new journey begins.
Today will be my last day at @AbsaUganda and I look back at my journey with immense pride and gratitude.
I stepped into the role at the pivotal moment of transition from Barclays to Absa. We were handed a young brand, coming off a legacy that had been in existence in Uganda for over 90 years, and we managed to build it into one of the strongest and most recognisable brands in the country.
We worked to greatly improve the customer experience - a feat we achieved by treating every client interaction with empathy and by recognising the critical role our colleagues play in creating memorable experiences for our clients.
We also focused on ensuring the team achieved real growth by enriching their roles and empowering them to earn and save more.
To the amazing team at Absa Uganda: thank you for your relentless dedication, your innovative spirit, and above all, for the growth you have demonstrated among yourselves and triggered within me.
To the leadership team, thank you @DavidAWandera, Rick de Kock and Sydney Mbhele for your candour, steer and support.
Here’s to taking on new challenges and the constant pursuit of growth.
Helen Nangonzi retweeted
C-section price has been reduced to UGX 25,000 ($7) from UGX 50,000 ($14) at Lacor Hospital. It's also the best General Hospital in Uganda. Consultation fee is UGX 7,000
ICU care at UGX 30,000 with a waiver policy for patients who can't pay
Similar PNFP hospitals charge UGX 1M+
Helen Nangonzi retweeted
Well, the Children's Surgical Hospital at Entebbe by @emergency_ong charges 0 (zero) shillings for use of its 6 ICU and 16 HDU beds for all children under 18.
Has so far had over 4,000 surgical interventions in 5 years
St Mary’s Hospital Lacor has the cheapest ICU fees in the whole world.
At just 7USD / 30k ugx per day🤭
This deserves a Guinness world record @GWR 💯
Helen Nangonzi retweeted
Happiness is when you realize your children have turned out to be good people.
Helen Nangonzi retweeted
I just voted to help Dr. Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka become the 2026 CNN Hero of the Year. You can help make it happen by voting at cnn.com/world/heroes/vote
While I think we’ve managed to somewhat narrow marketing down to an almost exact science, I think we sometimes underestimate the role of luck in all that we do.
We try to understand the complex interactions between people, their thoughts, beliefs and feelings, and their surroundings.
We make decisions based on often imperfect information - some of which involve making commitments that are hard to reverse.
Think of how many campaigns we’ve flighted that we thought would be a hit, but failed dismally. Or the campaigns we knew wouldn’t go too far, but ended up being absolute gold.
The key to building a long-term competitive advantage isn’t always having the best research, agency, or campaign execution. Sometimes, it just means having the deepest possible understanding of your target customer and your own objectives, and then selecting the idea that has the best chance of resonating with them emotionally.
My formula for avoiding regret: Find what you’re curious about or good at. Immerse yourself in it, learn from it, fail at it, take calculated risks, and get very good at it through grit and unwavering effort. If it’s not the right fit, find the next thing, and the next.
When you do find it, connect your passion to something meaningful to you or make a positive difference in your community or the world around you.
Once you have arrived, build ladders for others to climb. This creates a domino effect of passionate people doing good, sparking a cycle of even more passionate people.
Resharing Angela Duckworth’s book, Grit, in which she shares practical lessons on maximising the potential and ROI of one's passion through hard work and resilience.
The value of a business is a product of its service offering and the efficiency of its operating model. Together, these two define your brand.
If you have a great service offering (great chocolate) but an inefficient operating model (you promise 20 cartons a day but consistently deliver less than 10), you kill your brand. And if you have a great operating model but a poor product or service, you are simply delivering a bad experience faster.
The key is to master both.
Brands are multipliers. They act to accelerate the value of a product or service and business model, but they are not a business model in themselves. Fix the service offering and the operating model, and you have a great brand.
While I always enjoy memes like this, they are a reminder that marketing is a crash course in cost discipline.
Because marketing is traditionally classified as an operating expense, it is often the first item on the chopping board when budgets need to be tightened. Despite this, we are still expected to deliver exceptional results.
Ultimately, this forces us to be more innovative in our marketing and customer acquisition strategies.
So, to our marketing partners: when we push you to deliver Mount Kilimanjaro on a Muyenga hill budget, please understand that our shared goal is simply to drive maximum business value at the lowest possible cost.
But, we are also alive to the reality that there will be campaigns and initiatives where quality can’t be compromised at the expense of cost discipline.
