The progress of any community or nation anywhere in the world is heavily dependent on the education of its citizenry. Education is a fundamental human right in Uganda and the world. SDG4 also emphasizes ensuring inclusive and equitable education for all.

Despite the centrality of education in the advancement of various development indicators, the education sector in Uganda like in other sub-Saharan countries is still constrained with many challenges. From high levels of teacher and student absenteeism, weak and inefficient school level management structures, inability to make school fees payments due to inaccessible banking services, high school dropout rates to challenges around recruitment and management of teachers, the sector still has a long way to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education.

In a bid to solve some of the challenges enumerated above, Service Cops introduced a digital innovation known as SchoolPay in 2016. The introduction of SchoolPay as a digital payment solution has gradually helped to alleviate majority of these challenges. With SchoolPay, schools, parents, students, and guardians can pay school fees from anywhere at any time. SchoolPay partners with various payment channels such as mobile money (MTN, AIRTEL), banking agencies and other payment aggregator channels like PAYWAY and Interswitch.

Using the SchoolPay digital payment solution and a management information system provided to the school at no cost, schools have access to all payments made to the school from any channel in real-time. Schools are also able to set flexible payment plans that are tailor-made for different parents depending on affordability.

Over the years, data that has consequently been collected from SchoolPay reveals that the move to digital has caused a huge transformation in how school fees payments are done in Uganda. Available evidence shows that with the advent of SchoolPay, there has been a significant shift in paying school fees from banking halls to digital channels such as mobile money. For instance, Centenary Bank currently records over 80 percent of their school fees collections through SchoolPay as compared to other available options of traditional systems such as deposit slips, cheques, drafts, etc.

Over the years, the platform has been enhanced to provide for an enterprise resource planning solution called School Suite to manage the day-to-day operations of the school such as daily attendance in school and class for both teachers and students, student enrollment, examinations and academic reporting, school planning, and e-learning. The payments platform is also being enhanced with a digital education insurance service to provide access to insurance to low-income earners. This is envisaged to foster continuity of education through easing access to digital loans and savings to provide education financing to parents to keep their children in school.

The United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) under their global strategy “Leaving No One Behind in the Digital Era” is currently playing a market facilitator role in ensuring that these innovations reach the last person in the country. Through funding from UNCDF, Service Cops has been able to scale up the SchoolPay and School Suite innovations in the areas of Kiryandongo, West Nile, Acholi and Lango Sub regions.

Financial institutions like banks and mobile network operators are also making a huge contribution in the drive to digitalize the education sector. At the launch of Service Cops educational project in partnership with UNCDF dubbed Transforming education through digital innovations held in Arua in April 2021, Stanbic Bank Uganda’s Head of Digital, Saka Tito, announced their decision to focus on the school pay solution because of the footprint and impact Service Cops already has in the digital space. It is efforts like these that will see an increment in adaptability of these innovations.

Despite all these efforts, there are still several factors that continue to affect digitalization of education. The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in Uganda in early 2020 disrupted the education of over 15 million school-going children. The government of Uganda was forced to close schools and with the pandemic spreading into 2021, it has made it more difficult for the government to find alternative ways to provide education. This has led to many children dropping out of school, unplanned pregnancies amongst adolescent girls and young women, increase in illiteracy rates, school closures and loss of employment especially for people in the education sector. Some private schools have been sold off and others repurposed into various businesses such as rental units.

There is therefore an urgent need and a window of opportunity to set-up online web-based learning systems that could enable the continuation of education through innovative and distance approaches.

The success of digital innovations is highly hinged on the access to computers and the internet not only in schools but communities as well. Uganda has a population of 44 million people with only 21 million with access to the internet which questions the readiness of the market to embrace the digital era. Schools especially in the rural areas lack adequate infrastructure to support these innovations. Coupled with limited access to stable internet in rural areas and low digital literacy levels, addressing these challenges calls for deliberate efforts by all stakeholders for digital inclusion to be achieved.

For instance, Service Cops launched a teacher attendance module embedded in the School Suite platform in April 2021. So far, Mvara Senior Secondary school, in Arua (northern Uganda) embraced it to improve the monitoring of student and teacher attendance.

To ensure the platform is utilized, the school purchased two tablets to use to record attendance. However, that infrastructure is not sufficient to enable full utilization of the platforms since teachers require smartphones and internet to clock in and out of the platform. It is therefore imperative that telecoms like MTN and Airtel zero rate digital education platforms like School Pay in order to encourage the usability of these solutions to enable schools access these systems.

The ability for FinTechs like Service Cops in scaling up these digital innovations is largely dependent on the partnerships with financial institutions and telecoms, as well as key stakeholders in the education space. However, there are still some gaps affecting progress. For instance, telecoms and bank processes have increasingly made it difficult to expose playground environments to Service Cops to test their developments. Furthermore, financial institutions have been hesitant to adopt/finance some of the innovations like loans and savings. This has left funders like UNCDF to step in to explore additional loan financing modality to test the savings and loans model.

It is also very important for key stakeholders to focus on digitalizing the entire educational value chain, rather than focusing on only e-learning as it seems to be the case especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Schools continue to grapple with challenges around school operations management, and fees payments with the traditional paper-based systems. These digital platforms must be looked at as key drivers to growing financial inclusion, reducing literacy and dropout rates rather than being revenue streams for them.