FSD UgandaFrom access to usage: designing for inclusion at scale
Over the past decade, Uganda has made significant progress in expanding access to financial services. However, access has not consistently translated into usage, resilience, or improved financial outcomes. This gap is most evident among underserved groups, including women, smallholder farmers, and microenterprises.
FSD Uganda addresses this through its Digital Financial Services (DFS) pillar. In its refreshed strategy, the organisation places stronger focus on women, particularly young women aged 16 to 35.
In 2025, the pillar focused on one central question: what does it take to move from access to meaningful usage at scale?
Two priority areas shaped this work. First, generating evidence on how to better serve young women. Second, consolidating lessons from the platform-based approach to delivering financial services at scale.
Designing for young women
Increasing women’s financial participation strengthens financial systems and drives broader economic outcomes. However, access alone is not enough. Financial services must respond to the realities of women’s lives.
To support this shift, FSD Uganda launched a three-year Action Research programme on Young Women’s Financial Inclusion. The programme seeks to design financial solutions that are relevant, accessible, and usable for young women.
Young women aged 16–24 represent 4.36 million people, approximately 18 percent of Uganda’s adult population. Despite their size, they face multiple barriers to financial inclusion. They are less likely to own phones or national identification, often have lower and more irregular incomes, and carry a disproportionate burden of unpaid care work. Social norms continue to shape their economic participation.
At the same time, the opportunity is significant. Financial inclusion among young women is improving. More are saving, planning, and engaging with financial tools, while social norms are shifting, particularly among younger and unmarried women.
Analysis of FinScope Uganda 2023 data shows that young women are not a homogeneous group. Their financial behaviours, needs, and opportunities differ significantly. This requires more targeted and differentiated approaches.
Designing for young women is therefore not a niche effort. It addresses broader systemic barriers such as access to identification, mobile technology, and appropriate product design. Solving these constraints improves access for other underserved groups as well.
The next phase of this work will translate these insights into practical solutions, including piloting products that improve accessibility, affordability, and usability for young women.
Learning from the platform approach
Digital platforms offer important lessons for this next phase. By reducing transaction costs and enabling remote access, they show how financial services can become more flexible and affordable.
This is especially relevant for young women, who often have lower and irregular incomes, mobility constraints, and unpaid care responsibilities that limit access to traditional financial services.
Insights from the platform economy strategy pilot will help shape future interventions. They also reinforce an important lesson: technology alone is not enough. Inclusion depends on trust, usability, and services that respond to everyday realities.
Testing platform-based delivery models
Between 2022 and 2025, FSD Uganda tested a platform-based approach to delivering financial services at scale, particularly within agricultural value chains.
This work responded to a persistent challenge. While access to digital financial services had expanded, smallholder farmers remained underserved due to weak market linkages, limited financial records, and products that did not align with seasonal livelihoods.
The approach focused on partnerships with digital platforms including Ensibuuko, Emata, Quest Digital Finance, and ClinicPesa. These platforms combined financial services with market access, record-keeping, and insurance, working through cooperatives, savings groups, and farmer networks to reach last-mile users.
Together, these models reached over half a million household members and generated important lessons on how digital financial services can move beyond access to sustained usage and resilience.
Quest Digital Finance demonstrated how partnerships with SACCOs, agribusinesses, and financial institutions can strengthen both service delivery and platform sustainability. Ensibuuko showed how digitised Village Savings and Loan Associations can deepen women’s financial inclusion at scale. Emata highlighted the importance of agent-based delivery and cooperative structures in improving adoption among low-literacy farmers.
These experiences reinforced that sustainable financial inclusion depends not only on digital access, but also on trust, usability, strong delivery channels, and products that reflect how people actually live and work.
Lessons that emerged
Financial solutions must reflect real economic lives
Agricultural value chains differ significantly. Cash flows are seasonal, risks vary, and repayment patterns do not follow standard banking models. Financial products performed better where repayment terms, ticket sizes, and loan features were adapted to specific livelihoods. This has direct implications for young women, whose incomes are often smaller, irregular, and shaped by both economic activity and unpaid care responsibilities.
Adoption depends on human infrastructure, not just digital systems
Across all platforms, uptake was strongest where users were supported by trusted intermediaries such as cooperative leaders, community trainers, and mobile money agents.
For young women, this support is even more important. Limited mobility and social norms can restrict direct engagement with formal institutions, increasing reliance on trusted community-based channels.
Trust is built through visible value
Users engaged more actively when services delivered clear and timely benefits. Reliable insurance payouts, transparent processes, and consistent service-built confidence. Delays or unclear terms quickly eroded trust.
For users with limited financial buffers, including many young women, reliability is critical.
Gender gaps require deliberate design
Despite women’s central role in agriculture, uptake of digital financial services remained low across platforms due to structural barriers such as limited control over income, assets, and decision-making.
Addressing this requires deliberate product design, alternative data for credit scoring, and delivery models that reflect women’s realities.
Partnerships are critical for scale
Successful platforms depended on strong collaboration with financial institutions, off-takers, input suppliers, and mobile network operators. These partnerships strengthened value chains and improved sustainability. They also created opportunities to intentionally reach underserved users, including young women, through more coordinated approaches.
These lessons reinforce a central point: digital financial inclusion does not scale through technology alone. It requires coordinated systems that combine infrastructure, institutions, and user readiness.
