Faith already knows what she needs: Shs3m, a petrol supply contract, and a lender willing torecognise women’s economic potential.
Look at what she has actually built, which is three years of savings group discipline, consistent market trading, and a business plan with real numbers.
The problem is that the financial system has no mechanism to see it.
RelaThat is fixable. But fixing it requires naming, in sequence, the structural failures that produce her invisibility, and being honest about which are technical, which are political, and which are both.
The identity problem
Start with the most immediately solvable failure: 900,000 young women using mobile money through accounts registered in someone else’s name, according to Financial Sector Deepening (FSD) Uganda’s latest study.
These women are not outside the financial system behaviourally. They transact regularly, with discipline and real demand. What they lack is legal identity within it, meaning the transaction history they are building accrues to someone else’s record.
Getting that identity is not technically difficult. Airtel has already built the solution.
Hope Ekudu, who leads Airtel Money’s operations in Uganda, explains that they have streamlined the ‘process so that if you get your national ID, you can come to any of our shops and actually deregister’.
‘Once you have deregistered and you now re-register in your name, all your information on Airtel Money remains there.’
Where the original account holder cannot be found, a statutory declaration suffices.
The national ID problem compounds this. Most young women in rural Uganda, where only 6.6 percent of adults have access to a formal bank account, live far from registration centres, research by FSD shows.
Justine Namata, Head of Financial Innovations at Bank of Uganda, names the institutional failure this creates.
‘We keep going to the financial service providers and saying, ‘ What are you producing that our young women are not using. And today I see that they actually don’t see the data. What they see is a male-registered account, and yet the SIM card is being used by a 17-year-old girl,’ she says.
The invisibility is built into how providers read their own numbers. One fix is the standard practice in countries with high ID coverage, where they bring registration to schools, health centres, and hospitals, where young women cannot miss going.
The National Financial Inclusion Strategy 2023-2028 already requires gender-mainstreaming and sex-disaggregated data collection.
Mobile, community-based registration is looked at as the logical next step.
The village Saccos’ crack
Many people in financial inclusion look at Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLA) and see something primitive to replace.
A 2019 rigorous three-country study across Uganda, Ghana, and Malawi found that VSLA access increased the number of businesses members ran by 6 percent, extended their survival by 9 percent, and raised monthly profits by 24 percent.
These groups work because they run on something the formal system cannot manufacture: trust.
But the group has a ceiling. It cannot lend Faith Shs2m. The social capital is there. The capital is not.
Peace Gakwaya, the chief executive officer of Britam Asset Managers, says, ‘one of the greatest things about VSLAs is the trust they have created within the community’.
‘What we do is look at that ecosystem, especially how to plug in, not to replace, but to enhance the existing system.’
In that sense, the VSLA is the infrastructure through which formal finance should move in.
The mechanism already exists where digital group accounts record every contribution, loan, and repayment, giving each member their own verifiable transaction history, a foundation for credit access that does not require collateral.
Rani Deshpande, a financial inclusion consultant and the study’s lead researcher, found that some respondents had already grasped this intuitively, deliberately building transaction histories in anticipation of future borrowing, without anyone explaining the logic to them.
But she points out the main problem: ‘Many women do not know about mobile money savings accounts, which can help them save and grow their money.’
Health shocks are the mechanism that destroys what they build. Half of all young women in the FinScope 2023 survey cited family illness as their biggest financial shock of the past year.
A trader who has spent two years building business capital can lose everything to a single medical emergency, and in Uganda, where only 21 percent of women have ever accessed formal credit compared to 29 percent of men, there is no safety net to absorb it.
Gakwaya connects this to the product design failure: ‘About 50 percent of medical expenses were going not to them as an individual but to their family. The ideal client persona most service providers had in the beginning may not actually resonate well with the young woman we are looking at today.’
She believes the solution is to combine health insurance with savings groups, with insurance payments collected at regular group meetings and quick, practical benefits like money for transport to the hospital, daily cash support while admitted, so people can see the value of insurance right away.
Just 6.9 percent of Ugandan adults are currently covered by credit bureaus, according to a 2023 financial inclusion tracker by FSD, meaning that most borrowing remains informal.
Without gender-tagged data from Tier IV institutions like Saccos, digital lenders, and community micro-lenders, disciplined female borrowers remain invisible to the national credit ecosystem, regardless of their behaviour.
The tax the poorest pay alone
Every solution above hits a ceiling if digital participation is unaffordable, and in Uganda, it is deliberately expensive.
The numbers from a study by Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) show the most comprehensive assessment of telecommunications taxation.
The ICT sector faces an Average Effective Tax Rate of 68 percent of pre-tax profit, against 39 percent in retail finance, according to calculations by Unwanted Witness, a digital rights organisation.
The UCC study corroborates this, describing the sector as carrying one of the heaviest cumulative tax burdens in East Africa, with excise duties alone accounting for approximately 45 percent of total tax payments by operators.
Mobile money users pay a 0.5 percent excise duty on the full value of every withdrawal, plus 15 percent value-added tax on service fees and a 10 percent withholding tax on agent commissions.
Bank customers pay tax only on ATM withdrawal fees. Uganda is the only East African country taxing withdrawals this way. Withdrawing Shs50,000 costs a mobile money user approximately Shs2,250 in combined charges.
The UCC study found that when the mobile money levy was introduced in 2018, around 70 percent of users reduced how often they transacted, with some abandoning the service entirely.
Research from Makerere’s Economic Policy Research Centre shows that a 10 percent price rise drives a 20 percent drop in mobile money usage; the tax’s introduction collapsed usage by 40 percent.
The women whose savings groups are their only financial infrastructure are not collateral damage in this calculation. They are its primary target.
Entry-level smartphones, which are the devices that unlock merchant wallets, digital group accounts, and savings lock features, are taxed on import at rates raising their price by 30 to 50 percent above base value, to between Shs330,000 and Shs460,000: out of reach for most rural households.
Uganda Bureau of Statistics data shows that the median monthly income is closer to Shs300,000, as most Ugandans work in subsistence agriculture or the informal sector.
The UCC study calculates that the total cost of owning and meaningfully using a basic smartphone over three years, including device, charging, and data, amounts to roughly 10 percent of average annual per capita income, rising to 20 to 25 percent for households in the bottom 40 percent.
The UCC’s own fiscal scenario simulations show that removing the 12 percent excise duty on internet data, or reducing VAT from 18 to 14 percent, would expand the subscriber base, increase data consumption, and ultimately generate higher government revenues over the medium term.
The November 2025 Global System for Mobile Communications Association (GSMA) report estimated that removing just the 12 per cent excise duty on internet data could bring four million more Ugandans online by 2030, create 1.79 million jobs, and generate Shs14.6 trillion in additional economic value.
South Africa removed its entry-level smartphone excise duty in 2025 and recorded a 16 percent rise in first-time smartphone buyers within months.
Ekudu does not soften this: ‘I know that it’s a deterrent for people to actually use mobile money. We’re in discussions with the regulator to reduce this cost burden. Ideally, we want a tiered charge, even lower for people doing lower transactions.’
Uganda’s own Digital Transformation Programme had its budget cut 28 percent in the 2026/27 financial year, from 1 to 0.4 percent of the national budget, leaving a Shs318b financing gap.
The UCC study argues that ICT is critical to economic transformation, yet it is not financed at a level consistent with that claim.
actually to use mobile money
At least 10 percent of young women who don’t borrow cite ‘not being allowed by family’ as their reason, according to research by FSD, against just 4 percent of the general non-borrowing population.
Phones are gatekept. SIM registrations are controlled. Savings are monitored by household members who did not earn them.
The evidence on what works is that household dialogue programmes that engage men and boys, not as obstacles but as participants in a shared economic logic, produce documented shifts in gatekeeping behaviour.
The idea is that when men understand that a woman’s financial product strengthens the household economy, access changes.