NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Thursday, December 12, 2013

To Richard Mwebaze, the message was loud, clear and a welcome relief from those dreaded bank queues. The head teacher at one of his children’s school said parents were now free to pay school fees by mobile money.

But one question still bothered Mwebaze: how would the school differentiate the money he paid for his daughter and some other parents’ because many parents paid in instalments.

“The headmaster told me that I just write my daughter’s name and class in the ’reason box’. I successfully paid her fees for the whole of this year. I will not bother with banks again,” Mwebaze said.

More and more Ugandans are beginning to embrace mobile money. The service has shifted from its traditional platform of sending and receiving to facilitating transactions. From paying tithe at some churches, to fuelling at a pump station, anything is almost possible with mobile money.