Women in fintech to be incubated

BUSINESS   FINTECH 

Fifteen female-led financial technology teams that participated in the just-concluded Women in Fintech Hackathon and summit will be incubated so as to help them sharpen their ideas into ready market solutions.

The HiPipo chief executive officer Innocent Kawooya revealed this during the women in Fintech summit at Sheraton Kampala Hotel on Friday.

Kawooya said that HiPipo intends to create an innovation hub to nurture their financial technology (Fintech) ideas for a year and actualise them into solutions that are ready to go to the market to solve existing challenges.

Fintechs are firms which use technology to enhance financial processes such as facilitating mobile payments, loan provision, bill payments and money transfers, among others.

Although 30 teams expressed interest to participate in the Hackathon, only 15 were shortlisted, according to the HiPipo chief operations officer, Nicholas Kalungi.

They are Yo Uganda, Team Spec, E-Moments, W-Sacco, Kanzu Code Ladies, GreenGrab, Anchors, UgMart, Hack Girls, Team Kameeza, Alpteq ICT Solutions, Team Affinity, Sky Code, Team Time and Kuzimba Services.

The teams dedicated a week from September 12 to 17, to conceptualise and develop different financial inclusion products with special focus on women in areas such as payments, savings, lending, e-commerce, e-education and e-agriculture, among others.

Organised under the theme; "fostering leadership, innovation and championing women empowerment", the summit was the culmination of the weeklong Hackathon that sought to generate interoperable financial inclusion solutions for women, by women.

The Kanzu Code Ladies team, which developed an online bank to ease access to finance for local women, emerged the grand winner, taking home $2,000 (about sh7.3m) to be used to take their solution on the market.

The other top four - E-Moments, Anchors, Affinity and Hack Girls, will also share $2,000 (sh7.3m) among themselves.

The event was organised by HiPipo under the Include EveryOne program, in partnership with ID8, Crosslake Tech, ModusBox, Mojaloop Foundation and the Level One Project.

Changing the story

The event is part of HiPipo efforts to increase women participation in financial technology space. It is said that there are very few women who are founders, leaders or even work in Fintechs.

Research by DHR International, a global executive search firm, only 8% of fintech directors worldwide are female. Although there are no readily available statistics, women participation in financial technology in Uganda is negligible.

According to Kawooya, HiPipo wants to support women to become key players in the fintech space in Uganda and world over.

Damali Ssali, a trade development expert said involving women in product conceptualisation, design and development will open doors to tap into the underserved market segment of Ugandan women entrepreneurs by innovating solutions that meet their needs.

"Over 70 per cent of informal cross border, women traders need access to affordable fintech solutions that can catalyze their businesses. Bank of Uganda estimated informal cross border trade at $595m in 2018; that segment alone offers a lucrative and ready market for innovative fintech solutions which can only be designed and developed through greater involvement of women in fintechs," she said.

The Women in Payments founder and chief executive officer, Eng. Kristy Duncan alluded to the need for increased women participation to spur innovation and increase uptake of fintech products.

"Without including female innovators, we are only innovating for half of the population; this is an unfortunate waste of a big resource. We all know that women make almost three-quarters of day-to-day purchase decisions and they understand customer experience for the female users more than men," Eng. Duncan said.

Information and Communication Technology minister Judith Nabakooba noted that there is need to develop and implement strategies that promote the access and usage of ICTs by Women through implementing interventions that remove roadblocks to access and usage, so as to reduce the digital divide.

She, however, challenged stakeholders to promote responsible and safe ICT use while maximizing the intended benefits.

"There is need to be cognizant of the dangers and risks brought about by digitization that include cybercrimes such as identity theft, online bullying which sometimes culminate into rape, kidnap or even murder," she said.

The state minister for public service Eng. David Karubanga applauded the organisers for thinking about women as the world grapples to reduce the dominance of men across sectors. He pledged government support in ensuring that more women play a major role in financial inclusion.

Interoperability

Mojaloop Foundation director, Adama Diallo alluded to the need for faster adoption of interoperable digital solutions, saying that it will pave the way to more inclusion for African countries, where millions are still financially excluded.

She added that adopting interoperable solutions - which provide open-source switching platform for creating digital payments platforms that connect all customers, merchants, banks, and other financial providers in an ecosystem - could save African governments close to a $1b (sh3.7 trillion) annually.

"Using the Mojaloop software platform would allow countries to innovate for Africa and beyond; with many countries contributing to and using the same system, the benefits could be scaled to benefit everyone and governments would save close to $1b annually by reducing leakage in public expenditure and tax revenues. That money could be repurposed towards investment in other critical areas," she said.