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Extending the Frontiers of Digital School Fees Payments

Educational institutions in Uganda are burdened by challenges associated with traditional cash-based systems of school fees payment and paper-based practices of managing day-to-day operations of schools pertaining to student and teacher attendance, finance, student data, academics, and reporting management. These challenges, in turn, affect parents, students, policymakers, and other stakeholders depending on their needs in the education sector. These challenges are more pronounced in Northern Uganda, a region with a higher poverty rate than other regions. Northern Uganda also hosts the highest number of refugees in the country.

To mitigate some of the mentioned constraints in this region, UNCDF, through financing from SIDA – Sweden’s government agency for development cooperation, provided a grant and technical assistance to Service Cops to scale up and mainstream a range of digital education technologies in Kiryandongo District, West Nile, Acholi and Lango subregions.

Through this partnership, Service Cops has scaled up digital school fees payments using SchoolPay. This case study highlights the platform’s features, the scaling process, and early lessons learned from implementing this project. UNCDF will carry out a more rigorous evaluation of the impact of this project as part of the wider Inclusive Digital Economies programme in Uganda and will publish the report by the end of 2023.