In Uganda in August 2026, a quiet but consequential debate is reshaping how financial institutions think about serving the country’s most underserved communities. And the clearest voice in that debate belongs to someone who has spent years not in a boardroom, but sitting across from farmers, small traders, and savings group members who have built their own parallel financial worlds out of necessity.
Abdallah Aziz Epalat, who manages SACCOs at Pearl Bank, has published a frank and deeply considered reflection on what years of working at the grassroots level of Uganda’s economy have taught him. His conclusions, shared in a detailed analysis on Chimpreports, challenge some of the most comfortable assumptions held inside the formal financial sector.
The Myth of the Technology Fix
Ask most fintech executives what stands between Uganda’s unbanked population and financial services, and they will likely point to infrastructure gaps, smartphone penetration rates, or the cost of connectivity. It is a tidy, solvable-sounding problem that justifies the next round of investment in digital platforms.
Epalat pushes back on that framing, hard. After working extensively with Pearl Bank’s digital wallet, Wendi, alongside thousands of SACCOs and savings groups across the country, his assessment is unambiguous: financial inclusion is not a technology problem. It is a trust problem, a behaviour problem, and a productivity problem.
That distinction carries enormous weight. A trust problem cannot be fixed by a better app. It requires a different kind of engagement, one that meets communities on their own terms rather than importing solutions designed for a different context entirely.
Understanding What Already Works
One of the more striking observations Epalat makes is that underserved Ugandans are not resistant to financial participation. Many of them have already built sophisticated systems. Savings groups across the country have operated for decades through physical meetings, cash pooling, handwritten records, and a network of trusted community officials. These systems work. They are familiar, they are accessible, and they reflect the real social infrastructure of the communities they serve.
But they also carry structural weaknesses. When a single individual holds the group’s funds, every member’s financial security depends on the integrity of one person. Poor record-keeping opens the door to disputes, sometimes over sums that would seem trivial from the outside but represent months of savings for those involved. Weak governance can quietly hollow out a group that is otherwise functioning well.
The implication Epalat draws is not that these groups should be dismantled or bypassed in favour of digital alternatives. It is that technology adds the most value when it strengthens the trust that already exists, rather than simply converting physical transactions into digital ones.
Confidence as Economic Infrastructure
This is the point where Epalat’s thinking becomes genuinely useful for policymakers and financial institutions alike. He describes confidence as economic infrastructure. It is not a soft, abstract concept. When people trust the system holding their money, they save more. When they save more, productive capital accumulates. When capital accumulates in communities that have historically been excluded from formal finance, the economic ripple effects are real and lasting.
Clear records, transparent multi-approval processes, and well-defined ownership of group funds do not just reduce disputes. They change behaviour. They signal to members that the system is designed to protect them, not expose them. That signal, repeated consistently over time, is what converts a cautious observer into an active participant.
The Hidden Costs Nobody Talks About
Epalat also draws attention to something the formal banking sector routinely underestimates: the true cost of conventional banking for rural and low-income customers extends well beyond the transaction fee printed on a receipt.
For a farmer living hours from the nearest bank branch, the cost of a transaction includes transport, time away from the fields or market, the opportunity cost of a lost working day, and sometimes an overnight stay. These invisible costs stack up quickly, and for people operating on thin margins, they are often decisive. A service that looks affordable on paper can be genuinely inaccessible in practice.
This is why the design of products and services for underserved communities cannot begin with a cost structure built for urban middle-class customers and then modified downward. It has to start from a completely different place, one that takes seriously what inclusion actually costs the person being included.
What This Means for Uganda’s Broader Economy
Uganda has one of the youngest and fastest-growing populations on the African continent. The majority of economic activity still runs through informal channels, and most Ugandans who earn, save, and transact do so outside the formal banking system. The gap between that reality and the aspirations of the country’s economic development agenda is significant.
Epalat’s experience at Pearl Bank suggests the gap will not close through product launches alone. It will close when financial institutions treat trust-building as a core business function, not a marketing exercise. When governance improvements in savings groups are seen as infrastructure investments, not social work. And when the design process for financial products starts with the customer’s full cost picture, not just the institution’s revenue model.
These are not radical ideas. But they are ideas that get crowded out when the dominant narrative around financial inclusion is driven by technology adoption metrics and account-opening targets.
A Different Kind of Scorecard
The formal financial sector has grown comfortable measuring inclusion in transaction volumes and user numbers. Those metrics matter. But Epalat’s work points toward a richer scorecard, one that asks whether communities are genuinely better served, whether trust is increasing, and whether the productivity of ordinary savers and traders is actually improving.
Uganda’s economy will not be transformed by financial inclusion alone. But financial inclusion that is grounded in trust, built around real community behaviour, and honest about true costs could unlock productive potential that has been sitting dormant for decades.
The question worth asking now is: how many financial institutions operating in Uganda are actually willing to redesign their approach around what communities need, rather than what is easiest to scale?
