FSDU DRAGING UGANDA OUT OF THE FINANCIAL STONE AGE

Uganda has never truly been a poor country.

What we have always been is an under-aggregated one—a place where money exists in fragments, scattered across households and hidden in the folds of everyday survival. Anyone who has lived here knows the choreography. Coins dropped into tins. Notes folded into kaveera and tucked under mattresses. A cow or goat standing in for a savings account. Family lending circles filling the gaps left by formal finance.

"Our people save, and often with remarkable discipline. What they have lacked are the mechanisms to turn that saving into something larger than the sum of its parts...

Scattered money is powerless money. It cannot compound. It cannot be intermediated. It cannot fuel investment or finance growth. It simply sleeps. And when money sleeps, the country sleeps with it. This is the quiet crisis at the heart of our development challenge: not the absence of resources, but the absence of aggregation.

That is what made Financial Sector Deepening Uganda’s (FSD) 10-year journey is worth more than ceremonial applause. At a recent event to commemorate the annivessary speaker after speaker underscored the organisation’s role in building the infrastructure, trust, and systems required to aggregate Uganda’s fragmented savings into national capital.

Central bank governor Michael Atingi-Ego, reminded the room that the financial sector we see today, more inclusive, more digital, more resilient, did not emerge by chance. It is the product of deliberate policy, thoughtful regulation, and patient collaboration.

He described the national payment switch, the central data hub, eKYC, digital supervision and other reforms as “the digital nervous system of our credit ecosystem,” the architecture that allows money to move safely and efficiently. Without such a nervous system, aggregation simply cannot happen. Money remains stuck in the micro-spaces of household life; it never graduates into productive capital.

Finance permanent secretary Ramathan Ggoobi, recounted walking into a bank as a young man, hoping to open a savings account, only to be asked whether he “really had money” (he did not name the bank).

 It was a humiliation delivered casually, but one so many Ugandans know intimately. He used the story to illustrate a larger point: the financial system was never built for the majority. And without inclusion, aggregation is that much harder. Money outside the system cannot help the person who owns it, nor can it help the country that needs it.

Together, these two voices captured the twin truths of Uganda’s financial evolution: that systems build trust, and trust builds inclusion. And inclusion is the gateway to aggregation.

This is the context in which FSD Uganda’s work over the past decade becomes transformative. Through policy support, a steady push for innovation, and an insistence on evidence-based dialogue across the sector, financial inclusion has risen from 29% to 68%. Beneath that statistic lies a more meaningful shift—billions of shillings have migrated from mattresses, secret tins, and informal networks into the formal economy, where they can be intermediated, lent out, invested, and multiplied. Ugandans who were once spectators to the monetised economy are now participants in it.

At the same time, FSD has worked to widen the channels through which aggregated money can flow. The Mastercard Foundation, supported Recovery Fund has channelled credit to over 130,000 micro and small businesses, 70% of them women-led enterprises that have always had the energy and ambition, but rarely the capital. The Deal Flow Facility, now mobilising over $8.2 million for growth-stage firms, is pushing opportunity closer to investment, turning potential into financing reality. Both initiatives reflect the same principle: aggregation is not only about savings—it is also about aligning capital with the ventures capable of driving structural transformation.

"Uganda’s entrepreneurs have never lacked drive. What they have lacked are mechanisms linking that drive to finance. FSDU has helped build those mechanisms.

This work becomes even more urgent when set against Uganda’s long-term economic ambition. Vision 2040, reinforced by government’s tenfold growth agenda, requires private-sector credit to expand from sh27 trillion to more than sh270 trillion. It is an audacious expectation—and it is only possible if Uganda aggregates its savings at scale. Household savings, SACCO deposits, pension surpluses, remittances, mobile money balances, investment capital, these must be pooled into channels capable of financing agriculture, manufacturing, technology, renewable energy, and the logistics systems of a modern economy.

This is why Project Okusevinga, reducing the minimum investment in government securities to sh10,000, is so consequential. It democratises investment. It makes wealth-building a mass-participation activity. If embraced, it could shift Uganda from a cash-based culture to a savings-and-investment culture within a decade.

Obviously there is still a lot of work to be done. Emma Mugisha, FSDU’s Board Chair captured the moment aptly: the first decade was about building the pipes; the next must be about filling them. Uganda now has the rails -- digital, regulatory, institutional, required for national aggregation. What remains is to build the culture, trust, and usage that turn infrastructure into impact.

Uganda is not poor. Uganda is under-aggregated. And FSD Uganda’s first 10 years show what becomes possible when a country begins to solve that problem—quietly, steadily, one account, one business, one innovation, one empowered citizen at a time. The task of the next decade is simple but profound: to turn aggregation into transformation.