Updates

Boarding schools’ students always need some upkeep. Commonly know as ‘Pocket Money’, these funds enable them to restock their ‘School Grab’, affordable to buy eats at their canteens, contribute church tithe and pay for some school activities such as sports, parties and outings.

Traditionally, this money has always been kept by the students directly or kept by the school bursars, matrons, patrons and teachers. But this always comes with its unique challenges. Money kept by students is prone to either getting misplaced or stolen by their colleagues while that kept by the school staff sometimes gets mismanaged by the same staff.

In a move to address these issues, a team of young innovators a few years ago developed a digital financial services product. Named Kawu; this platform enables parents to digitally send pocket money to their kids through an APP or USSD and also allows students to receive this money on a smart card and digitally spend it at their canteens.

“We basically issue out credit and debit cards to students. In most African schools, students are not around to have mobile phones. So, when they are in schools, the only way they can access money is through cash. What we do is we take away all that process of sending money to students through teachers who then give it to them in cash. Kawu allows you as a parent to send money directly to the student, who then receives it on his/her smart card and uses the same card to make payments, save and make necessary withdraws,” explained Steven Kakooza, a co-founder and director at Kawu.  

He added: “When you look at the Education system in Africa, you find that students spend on average nine months every year in school. On average, someone spends 15 years in school. These are years the Youth spend without accessing digital financial services yet they need them. We created Kawu to address this issue. Because, the earlier we introduce the Youth to digital financial services, the better for them as they are able to transact, and start saving at an early age.”

He revealed that since its launch in 2022, Kawu is currently used by more than 62,000 active customers – students and parents, in up to 70 schools across Uganda. He highlighted that to deliver this service, Kawu works with Interswitch; a bank of Uganda licensed financial technology company.

Kawu has featured on Day 40, the final day of the annual 40 Days 40 FinTechs initiative Season 5.

Run under HiPipo’s Include Everyone program that also encompasses other initiatives such as FinTech Landscape Exhibition, Women in FinTech Hackathon, Summit & Incubator, and the Digital and Financial Inclusion Summit and Digital Impact Awards Africa; the #40Days40FinTechs platform aptly provides a setting for the various players and stakeholders involved in digital and financial technology to exhibit their products and services. It also gives players a platform to share their ideas on how the unserved and underserved by the present financial systems can be brought into the fold.

With over 150 participants in the last four years, #40Days40FinTechs continues to be the world’s premier showcase event for innovations that are enabling underserved populations to join the digital economy space. We know that this can only get better owing to the inspiration and collaboration of our partners; Level One Project, Mojaloop Foundation, INFITX, Cyberplc Academy, Ideation Corner, and Crosslake Technologies. Most importantly, the initiative owes its continued success to the generous support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

A group of Young Ugandans are determined to revolutionize Savings and Investments through a digital platform named Eazy Sacco.

According to Ben Okello Mwaka, the Founder and CEO of this platform, Eazy Sacco is a FinTech solution that concentrates on savings and investments for the unbanked and underserved communities.

“The idea of Eazy Sacco came up in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. We had been part of Savings groups that died during this period. So, we thought that we would use technology to make these Savings groups work. Since 2019, we have been working on this product. We officially launched it in 2023. Our platform is accessible through Web and a Mobile APP while works on the USSD alternative are underway,” Mr Okello stated, adding;

“When some accesses the platform, they create an account. Once the account is verified, you can either create or join a savings or investment group. The platform gives you control over your funds and how to access them and also allows you to join more than one group.”  

He noted that since 2023, Eazy Sacco has been able to on-board some 20 Savings Groups and currently serving about 1000 active users.

“We have partnered with financial technology companies that offer payment services, so you can transfer money from a bank or mobile money account to your Eazy Sacco account. You can also withdraw money from your Eazy Sacco account back to your mobile money account. One of our partners is Eversend Uganda; a licensed and regulated financial technology organization. In future, we intend to secure our own licenses and setting up our own in-house payment gateways,” Okello noted.

Eazy Sacco has featured on Day 39 of the annual 40 Days 40 FinTechs initiative Season 5.

Run under HiPipo’s Include Everyone program that also encompasses other initiatives such as FinTech Landscape Exhibition, Women in FinTech Hackathon, Summit & Incubator, and the Digital and Financial Inclusion Summit and Digital Impact Awards Africa; the #40Days40FinTechs platform aptly provides a setting for the various players and stakeholders involved in digital and financial technology to exhibit their products and services. It also gives players a platform to share their ideas on how the unserved and underserved by the present financial systems can be brought into the fold.

With over 150 participants in the last four years, #40Days40FinTechs continues to be the world’s premier showcase event for innovations that are enabling underserved populations to join the digital economy space. We know that this can only get better owing to the inspiration and collaboration of our partners; Level One Project, Mojaloop Foundation, INFITX, Cyberplc Academy, Ideation Corner, and Crosslake Technologies. Most importantly, the initiative owes its continued success to the generous support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Informal Women Traders and Youth are some of the most unserved and underserved people in matters digital and finance. For finance particularly, this is so because most Informal Women and Youth don’t have collateral security to use to access credit plus majority of their businesses are undocumented thus lack proper financial records and data to support their need for finances.

With most formal institutions not welcoming them, many turn to seeking for support from alternative credit channels which are usually expensive.

However, innovators are contributing to addressing this challenge through developing platforms that help create financial history and also record business data for these kinds of businesses. One such platforms is Tawaza Digital Varieties; a new digital and financial inclusion start-up for Informal Women and Youth. 

“We are a digital financial services provider currently doing savings, credit and payments. We mainly work with Women and Youth in the informal sector. We deliver these services through a digital platform that was installed for us by our partners – Instersolve, Kenya. This platform came with a complete framework that allows us to onboard users and also be able to have subscribers visit it and learn more about how to work with digital products,” noted Winfred Nandawula, the regional programs director for Tawaza Digital Varieties.

She added: “Among the digital products we have is Diva Grow; this allows customers to do saving and investment. After subscription, they choose from three available options and get started. They can deposit, withdraw and buy shares. We also have a digital ledger product, which helps small businesses to smartly record their business records and use them to access finance.”

Nandawula highlighted that their target audience are people with some income source but have been left out of the formal finance systems due to absence of records about their businesses. She noted that Tawaza is accessible both as a mobile APP and through USSD.

“We started to offer digital financial services in 2022. We have onboarded over 1300 subscribers and on these, some 200 are active monthly platform users. These save and access credit of not more than UGX 500,000 every now and then,” she noted.

Tawaza has featured on Day 38 of the annual 40 Days 40 FinTechs initiative Season 5.

Run under HiPipo’s Include Everyone program that also encompasses other initiatives such as FinTech Landscape Exhibition, Women in FinTech Hackathon, Summit & Incubator, and the Digital and Financial Inclusion Summit and Digital Impact Awards Africa; the #40Days40FinTechs platform aptly provides a setting for the various players and stakeholders involved in digital and financial technology to exhibit their products and services. It also gives players a platform to share their ideas on how the unserved and underserved by the present financial systems can be brought into the fold.

With over 150 participants in the last four years, #40Days40FinTechs continues to be the world’s premier showcase event for innovations that are enabling underserved populations to join the digital economy space. We know that this can only get better owing to the inspiration and collaboration of our partners; Level One Project, Mojaloop Foundation, INFITX, Cyberplc Academy, Ideation Corner, and Crosslake Technologies. Most importantly, the initiative owes its continued success to the generous support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Since time immemorial, many people have been investing in tangible assets mainly, land, houses, automotives, and animals. But with technology, investment options have expanded with Treasury Bills, Bonds, Equity and Shares among others added to a list of areas of investment.

Among the companies that are providing technology supported investment in Uganda is XENO.

“We are a licensed Fund Manager that is helping over 120,000 individuals, groups and institutions to plan, save and invest for future expenses. We are using technology to help anyone who has a future goal to start saving from as low as UGX 10,000. We have a mobile APP, available on web and available on the MTN MoMo USSD,” said Arthur Nakkaka, a Product Manager XENO Uganda.

He added: “We are at the intersection of Fund Management and Technology. As a Fund Manager, we are a run four regulated funds. Bond Fund, Money Market Fund and Two Equity Funds. On the other side, we are a technology company that is using technology to offer a service that was once only available to a niche audience. We are distributing this service at scale to anyone who is able to save.”

He noted that XENO supports its customers to come up with a saving plan, design a portfolio and execute it, with continuous tracking through a mobile APP and guidance.

“For any saver, we need to understand why they are saving. There are very many modes of investment but the one we believe is the most effective is the goal-based investment. We always ask our clients what goal they want to achieve, we then ask them, the period they want to achieve this. After aligning on this, a customer goes on the XENO APP or the MTN MoMo USSD and get started. We also need to understand your attitude towards risk as this will determine where we will invest your money. So, what you save per day or month plus the returns you get from the investment is what will enable you achieve your goal,” he said.

He highlighted that they welcome customers as individuals, partners, and groups which can be formal or informal groups. The other customers they serve are institutional customers. He revealed that the most popular goals on the XENO platform are building wealth, education, building a home, retirement and income drawdown.

In Uganda, XENO Investment Management Limited is licensed and regulated as a Fund Manager by Uganda’s Capital Markets Authority and by the Uganda Retirement Benefits Regulatory Authority.

XENO has featured on Day 37 of the annual 40 Days 40 FinTechs initiative Season 5.

Run under HiPipo’s Include Everyone program that also encompasses other initiatives such as FinTech Landscape Exhibition, Women in FinTech Hackathon, Summit & Incubator, and the Digital and Financial Inclusion Summit and Digital Impact Awards Africa; the #40Days40FinTechs platform aptly provides a setting for the various players and stakeholders involved in digital and financial technology to exhibit their products and services. It also gives players a platform to share their ideas on how the unserved and underserved by the present financial systems can be brought into the fold.

With over 150 participants in the last four years, #40Days40FinTechs continues to be the world’s premier showcase event for innovations that are enabling underserved populations to join the digital economy space. We know that this can only get better owing to the inspiration and collaboration of our partners; Level One Project, Mojaloop Foundation, INFITX, Cyberplc Academy, Ideation Corner, and Crosslake Technologies. Most importantly, the initiative owes its continued success to the generous support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Interaction between AgriTech and FinTech is key to ensuring that Farmers can benefit more from Agriculture. Well as AgriTech focuses mainly on introducing technology in to agriculture, integration with FinTech (financial technology) moves this a notch higher as it doesn’t only make farmers adopt technology for farming but also ensures that they are able to transact – make and receive payments from the comfort of their farms.

It is this interaction that Hamwe East Africa is spearheading. Started as an AgriTech in 2013, Hamwe has over the years transformed into an AgriTech – FinTech; all for the benefit of farmers.

“We work with underserved farmers in off the grid areas of Uganda and East Africa. Well as everybody else tried to work with Farmers in peri-urban areas and central region, for us, we decided to go to areas were farmers lack services such as internet access. These are the actual smallholder farmers that need support,” Stella N. Lugalambi, a co-founder and managing director of Hamwe East Africa noted.

She added: “We build a farmer management system that enables farmers get a farming system, digital identity and economic identity. We are giving smallholder farmers an identity that allows them to access finance because they will have a system with credible data to prove that they actually earn and can afford to manage this finance.”

Hamwe is active in Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi with plans to expand to the rest of East Africa in the near future.

“To date, we have over 400,000 farmers in Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. We are planning to go to Kenya and Tanzania and grow our numbers to one million farmers by 2025. The beginning was a bit difficult but now we onboard more farmers easily because we know what to do. Even farmers are also adapting easily.”

Lugalambi noted that they offer a complete agriculture support service. Hamwe East Africa’s bundled services to the over 400,000 farmers include farmers’ profiling, assessing farmers’ needs, identifying off takers, connecting farmers to inputs suppliers and ready markets, agronomy services, crop insurance, payments and access to credit.

“Majority of our members come from cooperatives. Our work is coordinated by digital community entrepreneurs that support between 100 to 300 farmers. The digital community entrepreneurs (DCE) talk to farmers at the last mile because we get them from the same community where the farmers come from so they can easily engage and support them. The DCEs report to Territory Executives at the district level,” she said. 

She revealed that in order to further support farmers, they added FinTech solutions to the platform which are enabling farmers to easily transact.

“To ensure that our farmers are served well, we signed up with mobile network operators – MTN and Airtel for a payment gateway. We are directly connected with the mobile money operators so our farmers get their payments directly to their phones. We have also signed up with banks and Flexipay. These payment alternatives ensure that our farmers don’t have to be embarrassed walking long distances to banks to access their money.”

She nonetheless called upon the government, telecom operators and development partners to invest more in network upgrade and data connectivity as this will enable more farmers benefit more from these services.

On their part, she noted that Hamwe has partnered with Mastercard Inc to deliver a community pass – an electronic card that stores farmers’ information.

“We have just rolled out this card and it is so far being used by about 20,000 farmers. This is our newest innovation. It is accessible offline. We plan to upgrade it to even support payments in the future,” she concluded. 

Hamwe has featured on Day 36 of the annual 40 Days 40 FinTechs initiative Season 5.

Run under HiPipo’s Include Everyone program that also encompasses other initiatives such as FinTech Landscape Exhibition, Women in FinTech Hackathon, Summit & Incubator, and the Digital and Financial Inclusion Summit and Digital Impact Awards Africa; the #40Days40FinTechs platform aptly provides a setting for the various players and stakeholders involved in digital and financial technology to exhibit their products and services. It also gives players a platform to share their ideas on how the unserved and underserved by the present financial systems can be brought into the fold.

With over 150 participants in the last four years, #40Days40FinTechs continues to be the world’s premier showcase event for innovations that are enabling underserved populations to join the digital economy space. We know that this can only get better owing to the inspiration and collaboration of our partners; Level One Project, Mojaloop Foundation, INFITX, Cyberplc Academy, Ideation Corner, and Crosslake Technologies. Most importantly, the initiative owes its continued success to the generous support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Informal cross border trade is one of the oldest forms of trade across Africa. It employs millions of people majority of them being women and youth.

Research carried out by the African Development Bank (AfDB) shows that cross-border trade is a source of income to millions of people across the African continent. Uganda alone has thousands of informal cross border traders plying their trade in border towns such as Malaba, Busia, Mutukula, Elegu, Katuna, Mirima, and Goli.

However, majority of these traders are faced with several challenges such as lack of market information, absence of interoperable payment platforms, counterfeits and fake money, and cases of mistreatment at the borders.

Nonetheless, innovators, government and development partners are working to mitigate, somewhat put an end to these issues. One way they are doing this is through developing digital platforms to support this kind of trade. Among such platforms being used by cross border traders in Uganda is iSOKO.

“In 2016, Trademark Africa conducted a research on why informal women cross border traders where losing a lot of money while conducting their business. This research revealed that the women traders were losing money due to lack of market information. That is how iSOKO came about with letter I standing for digital or internet and Soko meaning shop. So, Isoko simply means a digital/online shop,” Rogers Mwesigwa the ICT Technical Assistant for iSOKO, Uganda Chapter explained the genesis of this platform.

He added: “But on top of providing the traders with information, iSOKO also added more modules including the market module that enables traders to display and sell their products from wherever they are. As of today, iSOKO is being used in five countries – Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi. There is a plan to expand Isoko allover Africa with focus on the countries that Trademark Africa has presence in so that Africans can have an online shop that allows them to trade with in two or more states.”

Mwesigwa noted that iSOKO APP is downloadable on Google Play after which a trader can register and start trading in addition to accessing relevant trade facilitation information.

“After downloading and registering, the trader can then post their products. When a potential buyer sees the products, they place an order and the trader receives a notification. There is an in-chat APP within iSOKO that enables the trader and buyer to chat and negotiate. The APP also provides market information, daily exchange rate and information about taxes as well as a tax calculator.”

He revealed that iSOKO currently has over 80,000 users from allover the five countries with these numbers expected to grow to about 120,000 by the end of the year.

“When we started this platform, we focused on women. So, majority of the traders on the platform are women. However, we know that trade is not a one sex affair so we also onboard male traders.”

iSOKO has featured on Day 33 of the annual 40 Days 40 FinTechs initiative Season 5.

Run under HiPipo’s Include Everyone program that also encompasses other initiatives such as FinTech Landscape Exhibition, Women in FinTech Hackathon, Summit & Incubator, and the Digital and Financial Inclusion Summit and Digital Impact Awards Africa; the #40Days40FinTechs platform aptly provides a setting for the various players and stakeholders involved in digital and financial technology to exhibit their products and services. It also gives players a platform to share their ideas on how the unserved and underserved by the present financial systems can be brought into the fold.

With over 150 participants in the last four years, #40Days40FinTechs continues to be the world’s premier showcase event for innovations that are enabling underserved populations to join the digital economy space. We know that this can only get better owing to the inspiration and collaboration of our partners; Level One Project, Mojaloop Foundation, INFITX, Cyberplc Academy, Ideation Corner, and Crosslake Technologies. Most importantly, the initiative owes its continued success to the generous support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

SchoolPal, an education management system, is committed to using technology to transform education and enhance school life. This is according to its founder and CEO, Shane Senyonga.

“At SchoolPal, we deliver Education management solutions from a dashboard we give to schools and an APP that parents use to access school details for their children. We also have an APP specifically for teachers. Our core solutions are communication, performance analytics and payments,” Senyonga said.

He explained that for payments, SchoolPal supports school fees payments, pocket money and payment of other school related activities as such trips, plus items like books and new uniforms among others.

“The schools only have to set the school fees on the system. When the parents open the APP, they can pay the school fees and money deducted of their mobile money and bank payment cards such as Visa or Mastercard. Those off the APP can also pay through the USSD and get their receipts. At any point, the platform shows you your child’s school fees balance and sends reminders about the same. Parents can also pay for things like sweaters, after which the school gets the notification and gives the sweater to the pupil,” Senyonga noted.

He added: “We are also digitizing pocket money. We have a card we give to boarding school pupils. Through our APP, the parents can load pocket money on the card and the pupil will receive and use it. The parents are able to monitor how much their children are spending and can continuously top up for them.”

Senyonga noted that SchoolPal services are accessible after ‘schools registering on the platform and onboarding their students and their parents’.

“We have been building since platform 2022 but we entered the market this year. Our numbers are not too high but they are promising. We have several schools that have been on trial this term and will start using the platform for managing their payments in third term, so it is very promising,” he concluded.

SchoolPal has featured on Day 32 of the annual 40 Days 40 FinTechs initiative Season 5.

Run under HiPipo’s Include Everyone program that also encompasses other initiatives such as FinTech Landscape Exhibition, Women in FinTech Hackathon, Summit & Incubator, and the Digital and Financial Inclusion Summit and Digital Impact Awards Africa; the #40Days40FinTechs platform aptly provides a setting for the various players and stakeholders involved in digital and financial technology to exhibit their products and services. It also gives players a platform to share their ideas on how the unserved and underserved by the present financial systems can be brought into the fold.

With over 150 participants in the last four years, #40Days40FinTechs continues to be the world’s premier showcase event for innovations that are enabling underserved populations to join the digital economy space. We know that this can only get better owing to the inspiration and collaboration of our partners; Level One Project, Mojaloop Foundation, INFITX, Cyberplc Academy, Ideation Corner, and Crosslake Technologies. Most importantly, the initiative owes its continued success to the generous support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.