Category: Include Everyone

Imagine being a student with a personal assistant who can do research for you, prepare notes and even remind you of your to-do coursework.

Well, it has been made digitally possible.

Some innovative young Ugandans have come up with the Academic Personal Assistant (AIDA) platform which helps students to get all the required information from their school including their grades, results, news, and notes.

First piloted at Makerere University, this personal assistant is a product of Aspen Technologies Limited, a software development company.

According to Aksam Lwanga, the CEO of Aspen Technologies, this product – which is available on both WhatsApp and by downloading a mobile application – was designed to make studying a more interesting experience.

“The solution aims at bridging the gap. When it comes to making research and receiving your results, it requires you to travel long journeys to go to those schools. But, imagine you sitting in the comfort of anywhere and you type on your phone to receive all the information that you need,” he says.

How it works.

 A student is required to add the Aspen WhatsApp number to their contact list. Then they receive a link and by just typing Hi, they receive all the details such as; ‘This is AIDA, your academic personal assistant, how do you want us to help you?’

“So, you begin chatting with a virtual person to get assistance,” Lwanga says.

He notes that once the student clicks on any service, the virtual personal assistant will check if that student is already subscribed or logged in.

“If you are not logged in, it will require you to provide login credentials and as you do so, it will ask you if you consent that [we] are going to use this information to access your services. Once you consent that you want AIDA to have access to your account, it will automatically log in,” he says.  

If you are subscribed, it will give you the service that you want. If you are not, it will ask you to pay a subscription depending on the services that you want. That number will give you a prompt to add money to your mobile wallet. Once the payment is received, the student starts receiving the services.

Steady impact

Maria Vivian Awori, the COO of Aspen Technologies, says that when they first developed AIDA at Makerere University two years ago, it was a free trial for one year for students.

“We had 200 users and started with the College of Computing and Information Sciences. By 2023, we added a payment gateway where students are required to pay Shs 2,000 per service they access monthly. Since we are dealing with students, we didn’t want to complicate this whole process and that is why we narrowed it down to a favourable price for all,” she says, noting that they have so far had hundreds of transactions this year.

And the users are grateful.

 “AIDA has been helpful because since we mostly use WhatsApp in our daily interactions, AIDA has enabled me to access all my school accounts like the students’ portal and other portals to get notes. Instead of me going to platforms where we get notes or collect results that are uploaded by our lecturers, I just go to AIDA,” says Racheal Lorna Mbeiza, a Student at Makerere University. 

Linda Arwa from Makerere also says that with AIDA, students will never have to face the challenges of missing marks.

Techy World

Awori says that the challenge of limited adoption and mistrust among end-users persists for startups like Aspen. This is coupled with the competition brought by the many mushrooming Technology companies on the market.

“The 40 Days 40 FinTechs program is very helpful in enhancing the market strategy that we are trying to follow because of the visibility it provides,” she says.

“We also believe that the program will also help us to venture into other different sectors because we want to put the academic personal assistant into other different sectors like health to help them keep track of the different operations they are handling.”

Aspen is the 21^st participant in the fourth season of the 40 Days 40 FinTechs initiative that has become a household name in the financial technology space of the East African region.

Minus AIDA, Aspen has other solutions such as E-Commerce and Enterprise Resource Planning systems.

According to HiPipo CEO Innocent Kawooya, in the last three editions, more than 100 FinTechs have been showcased, highlighting stories changing people’s lives, especially in the under-served sectors.

This initiative is run by HiPipo in partnership with the Level One Project, Mojaloop Foundation, INFITX, Cyberplc Academy, Ideation Corner and Crosslake Technologies with generous support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Life-changing stories from more than 100 FinTechs have been highlighted by this initiative in the past three years.

Kampala, Uganda: Different reports indicate that Africa’s population is evenly distributed on sex and gender lines. Country Meters puts it at 50 percent for both women and men respectively while a 2021 World Bank report for Sub-Saharan Africa puts it at 50.2 percent in favor of Women and 49.8 percent for Men.

That said, there are glaring disparities when it comes to access to opportunities and resources. For instance, in 2021, less than 1 percent of foreign funding to Africa went to women-led enterprises.

As a way of addressing such inequalities, HiPipo, through its Include EveryOne Program, runs the annual Women in FinTech Hackathon, Summit, and Incubator project to especially empower women with the required digital and financial inclusion skills so that they can go out there; innovate, prosper, earn and develop their families and communities.

The cardinal purpose of these inter-twined initiatives is to champion women’s financial inclusion through active participation in the initiation, development, and rolling out of financial technology products that are well-tailored to serve women and everyone. And indeed, the HiPipo Women in FinTech initiative is exceptionally supporting efforts toward closing the Gender Gap in Access to Technology, Skills, and Usage of Digital Financial Services.

Between 2020 and 2022, the Women in FinTech Hackathon, Summit, and Incubator project attracted over 4,000 participants and directly trained more than 300 women. Through dedicated mentorship, many of these Women have since graduated as Software Engineers and Computer Science specialists. Some have ideated, developed, and launched Financial Technology products that are transforming their communities while others have received seed capital from both the project and external contributors to further pursue their dreams.

This success is thanks to HiPipo’s thoughtful Women Empowerment and Inclusion efforts, coupled with the commitment, collaboration, and active participation of its partners: Level One Project, Mojaloop Foundation, INFITX, Cyberplc Academy, Ideation Corner, and Crosslake Technologies. Even so, all this may have remained a pipe dream had it not been for the generous support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The fourth edition of the annual Women in FinTech initiative is here and will run between 10^th August and 8^th December 2023. First, the Women in FinTech Hackathon will run from 10^th to 18^th August while the Women in FinTech Summit will be held on 19^th August. Meanwhile, the Women in FinTech Incubator will run from 4^th September to 8^th December 2023.

“It is fulfilling to witness the greatness that has come from this initiative. In the last two years, over 50 of our past participants completed their University degrees in software engineering and other computer science-related courses. This is a clear way of closing the gender skills gap in the digital innovation and Financial Technology spaces. Many have conceived and developed amazing products, others are working tirelessly to roll out their innovations,” Innocent Kawooya, the HiPipo CEO, noted while announcing this year’s Women in FinTech edition.

He added: “In 2023, we are looking at having even a bigger contribution to Women’s Financial Inclusion. As we did in 2022, we are including the entire East African region. We intend to decentralize the Hackathon so that we give a fair chance to interested participants from across East Africa.”

The hackathon is open to women-led teams of 2 to 4 members, with each team having at least 67 percent female composition.

According to Charlotte Neeza, the HiPipo FinTech Events Manager; all interested participants only need to complete and submit the entry forms with details of their teams’ composition and the product they intend to innovate after which the organizing team will review each entry and revert.

“The registration link is available and active until the end of July 2023. But because this is a very competitive, first-come-first-serve hackathon competition, we encourage all those interested to register at the earliest possible time,” Neeza said.

The Women in FinTech Hackathon will culminate in the Women in FinTech summit on 19^th August 2023 where the best-performing teams and individuals from across East Africa will be announced and receive their share of the USD 10,000 collective prize money. This will be in addition to the winners automatically qualifying for the Women in FinTech Incubator program that will run from September until December 2023.

So, ladies; there you have it. Register your Team today and stand a chance to take part in this exciting Hackathon.

In case of any queries, reach out via socialweb@HiPipo.com

In Uganda, the word survival makes a lot of meaning because many people live on a hand-to-mouth income cycle. So, every working day matters. If you don’t work, you don’t eat!

The same applies to utilities. It is very common to find households paying daily electricity bills or weekly pay-tv subscriptions. So, the cost of transactions in such payments also matters. They are always looking for the cheaper option.

That is a problem EzeeMoney was designed to solve. EzeeMoney is a financial technology solution dealing with both financial and non-financial services providers targeting people at the bottom of the pyramid.

For instance, Miriam Mbambu, a manager at Grey Macy Finance in Bwaise, a Kampala suburb, says that people in her locality scamper for an EzeeMoney terminal at her place of work because of the low transaction costs compared to ordinary Mobile Money.

“People have found EzeeMoney easy and cheap. When their power is off, you see people rushing here to pay for Yaka, water bills, and TV subscriptions, among others,” she says.

According to Flavia Eleanor Kasenge, the Chief operations officer at EzeeMoney, their model lies in recruiting agents who purchase a terminal that is embedded with a bouquet of products that can be used for bills payment, payment collection, mobile money, airtime, and agency banking.

“On the non-financial side, we do tracking services and we track information in real-time. If you hold a case on the Jubilee card, we are the ones empowering it. It’s running on our platform,” she says.

EzeeMoney has been in existence for more than 10 years and Kasenge says this has enabled them to spread wings across many African countries where she says they have been part of bridging the digital transformation knowledge gap.

Regulated by the Bank of Uganda, EzeeMoney holds two licenses; payment service provider and operator.

“We are growing healthily. If you are to compare last year to date, we have grown by 10 percent,” she says.

Challenges

Kasenge says that one of the challenges they face is during the on-boarding of agents. During the Know-Your-Customer (KYC) process, many people lack the requisite information such as a national ID.

“Some people also don’t know where to find their LCs,” she says.

On top of this, there is a high turnover of agents who keep quitting their workplaces.

“Business owners always bring in new people that we have to keep retraining to close the knowledge gap,” she says.

On the part of agents, Mbambu from Bwaise says that the EzeeMoney terminals sometimes face network issues that disrupt business.

“For instance, you make a deposit and it shows you that the transaction has failed yet it hasn’t yet you have given the money back to the customer. This leads to losses; The EzeeMoney team should talk to telecom companies to make sure the network is stabilized because while the services of EzeeMoney are good, the network affects them,” she says.

Nonetheless, Kasenge says that initiatives such as 40 Days 40 FinTechs by HiPipo have created a paradigm shift in people’s minds about the FinTech industry. This is because it creates great awareness of the FinTech space with the different products being profiled.

“We can innovate according to the end user. We can know what our neighbour next door is offering and how we can work together to serve people at the bottom of the pyramid,” she says.

“As innovators, we have something cooking; the EzeeMoney app which will go live soon. It is one of the key products that we are looking to send out in the market for people to be able to get their services right at their doorstep. We shall connect it with the banks for people to withdraw from their accounts through the app or make payments as and when they are comfortable.”

Ezee Money is the 18^th participant in Season Four of 40 Days 40 FinTechs Initiative organised by HiPipo to shine a light on emerging Financial Technology stories changing lives.

According to Innocent Kawooya, the HiPipo CEO, this year’s initiative looks at the impact of FinTechs on the lives of end-users across East Africa.

This initiative is run by HiPipo in partnership with the Level One Project, Mojaloop Foundation, INFITX, Cyberplc Academy, Crosslake Technologies, and Ideation Corner with generous support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.