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.
