For years, Uganda’s digital lending sector has expanded at breathtaking speed, but without the underlying visibility required to support responsible growth. Borrowers have increasingly turned to mobile money as their...
There are years when an industry grows quietly, and then there are years when it changes character. For Uganda’s insurance industry, 2025 was unmistakably a change of character. Viewed from…
Paul Kavuma, the former Chief Executive Officer of Jubilee Allianz General Insurance Uganda, has announced his move to Liberty Uganda, where he takes up the role of Country Head of…
This festive season, Pearl Bank (formerly PostBank Uganda) reminded customers that banking can still feel human, warm, and personal, as it concluded its Christmas campaign dubbed “Pearl Santa.” The campaign…
Old Mutual Insurance Uganda, Uganda’s No.1 general insurer, has announced that its Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Stephen Chikovore, will step down from his role effective 31 January 2026.…
Beneath the spotless surface of a perfectly balanced budget, the Financial Intelligence Authority (FIA) is grappling with deeper issues of missed targets, shifting priorities, and implementation failures, an audit report…
A damning audit into the operations of the Microfinance Support Centre Limited (MSCL) reveals a sobering trail of missed targets, poor loan recovery, underutilised funds, and a ballooning portfolio of…
Uganda’s insurance industry registered a solid 10% growth in gross written premiums (GWP) in 2024, rising from UGX 1.60 trillion in 2023 to UGX 1.76 trillion—underscoring the sector’s resilience, adaptability,…
As the sun prepares to set on the Uganda Microfinance Regulatory Authority (UMRA), a withering report by the Auditor General lays bare a sobering truth. In just 12 months before…
Uganda’s biggest Fintech, MTN Mobile Money (MoMo), is moving out of the family home. Long treated as just another product line within the telecom’s machinery, MoMo is being carved out into a separate corporate entity—MTN New FinCo—with ambitions to scale faster, partner globally, and perhaps one day join Africa’s elusive unicorn club. It’s a shift more than a decade in the making. Launched in 2009, MoMo lived for years as a revenue-generating cog inside MTN Uganda’s telecom engine. Its financials were buried within a blended mix of voice, data, and airtime earnings. Even after the 2021 National Payment Systems Act…
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“Counting people should never cost a country its ability to make people count.” These words, first voiced during a 2015 keynote address by South African statistician Pali Lehohla at a UN Data Forum, warned of a dangerous paradox in national planning. In essence, Lehohla meant that the act of collecting statistics—however important—should not compromise the delivery of essential services that those statistics are meant to improve. Uganda’s 2024 national census embodied this contradiction. For instance, UGX1.61 billion meant for the Parish Development Model (PDM)—a programme targeting 39 percent of households stuck in subsistence—was diverted to plug funding gaps in the…
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Imagine Posta Uganda, formerly Uganda Post Limited, as a traditional service provider—delivering mail, packages, selling stamps, and offering agency banking in remote outposts. It’s not glamorous, but it remains an integral cog in Uganda’s infrastructure. But importance doesn’t always translate to profitability. In the year ended June 2024, Posta earned UGX18.55 billion in operating revenue, mostly from core activities like mail delivery, courier services, and agency functions. On paper, it reported UGX18.11 billion in expenses. However, the Auditor General put the actual figure at UGX17.33 billion, revealing a UGX780 million gap. The 4.3% variance raises eyebrows: Were some costs overstated?…
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In May 2021, Bank of Uganda issued two licenses to Airtel Mobile Commerce and MTN Mobile Money to conduct various money transfer and payment services. The licenses were partly intended to implement sections of the National Payment System Act 2020, which had transferred the regulation of mobile money from the Uganda Communications Commission to the Central Bank. In the years leading up to the enactment of the National Payment System Act 2020, there had been various conversations that highlighted the risk of an unregulated digital financial system. But in all this, government had become aware of the problem that not…
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It’s been 30 years since the first mobile phone was launched in Uganda. The launch, in 1995, of Celtel as the first mobile telecommunications company rewrote Uganda’s telecom story in ways no one would have imagined. It is a revolution that continues to evolve, and will be told for years. But the attempt, three years later, by Mr Charles Mbire, the current MTN chairman, to convince South African telecom company, MTN Group, to invest in Uganda is a story of its own. It shaped the industry that had for three years been monopolised by Celtel and declassed a sector that…
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PostBank Uganda emerged as the overall best-performing Tier 1 Bank recognised by the Bank of Uganda at the Award Ceremony for Participating Financial Institutions in the Agricultural Credit Facility (ACF)…
