A Region in One Room: SGI-Uganda Hosts the Second Cohort of the EAIBA CEO Masterclass

There is a particular energy that fills a room when leaders who usually compete across borders sit down to learn together. That was the atmosphere at the SBS Campus in Nairobi in early August, as Strathmore Global Institute – Uganda (SGI-Ug), in partnership with the East Africa Insurance Brokers Association (EAIBA), welcomed the second cohort of the EAIBA CEO Masterclass, a four-day executive programme built to sharpen how the region’s brokerage leaders think, decide, and lead.

SGI-Uganda actively extends Strathmore University’s values and work into Uganda, bringing the University’s executive education, research, faculty, and professional network directly to leaders across the wider region. The Masterclass is a clear expression of that mandate: a programme designed not for a single market, but for East Africa as a whole.

What made this cohort distinctive was the room itself. Chief Executive Officers, General Managers, and senior executives from leading brokerage and reinsurance firms in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Rwanda came together, each bringing the realities of a different regulatory environment and years of frontline experience. In that setting, a discussion about pricing pressure or digital disruption stops being theoretical: someone in the room has usually already lived it, and the peer learning that follows is candid in a way a classroom alone rarely achieves. This cross-border exchange is precisely the kind of professional network EAIBA exists to build.

Over four intensive days, participants worked through the themes that increasingly define success in the brokerage sector: self-insight and awareness, driving sustainable growth, negotiation and change management, performance and operational excellence, digital innovation, and ethical governance. The programme closed on a theme too often left unspoken among founders and long-serving CEOs preparing for succession and safeguarding institutional legacy.

True to Strathmore’s approach, sessions blended academic rigour with real case work, simulations, and structured peer learning, with each day ending in a reflection session that turned insight into intention. The result was less a course to be completed than a conversation participants will carry back into their firms.

Notably, this second cohort exists because the first asked for it. The inaugural group’s strong feedback and appetite for more is what brought Cohort two to life, a reminder that the most persuasive endorsement of executive education comes from those who have already been through it.

For SGI-Uganda, hosting this cohort reflects the belief that continuous learning is central to building high-performing organisations and strengthening the professionalism of the sectors they serve.

As demand builds for the next intake, the invitation is open to CEOs and to the senior leaders being groomed to succeed them. The next cohort is a seat at a table that few other rooms in the region can offer.

To learn more about the next cohort of the EAIBA CEO Masterclass, write to Francis Thenge at fthenge@strathmore.edu or call +256 326 100 500.

Article by Francis Thenge