EFFECT OF COVID – 19 ON MOBILE MONEY IN UGANDA

Abstract

During the outbreak of COVID-19 in March 2020 in Uganda, government came up with tough measures to restrain
the continuous spread of the Virus in the country. Among the measures put in place included total lockdown where
most of the people were limited from moving from one place to another. As a result of the total lockdown, many
people could not access their banks/ATM machines to withdraw money to meet their demands at home and were
only left with Mobile money transactions. During the period of COVID-19, 15 transactions per month were made by
every active mobile money account. Among the transactions made included mobile money-bank transfers, mobile
money deposits, and merchant payments among others. Thus, this paper analyzes how the outbreak of COVID-19
affected Mobile money performance by comparing the period before and after the outbreak of COVID-19 in
Uganda. A descriptive survey design was used in this study to examine how COVID-19 affected the performance of
Mobile money in Uganda. This design concentrated on only quantitative approaches. The study focused only on
secondary data which was obtained from Bank of Uganda from October 2019 to September 2020. The findings
reveal that mobile money number of transactions had a positive insignificant effect on the value of transactions
before COVID-19 period in Uganda (B coeff=18.73, P-value>0.05). However, since the effect was not significant,
this implies that before the outbreak of COVID-19 (Oct 2019- Feb 2020), the growth in MM number of transactions
had no influence on the value of MM transactions. The study recommended the telecommunication companies
should lower the cost of their services like cost of MBs and voice bundles during the period when government
imposes lockdown. This is based on the fact that most people were using mobile phones and internet to conduct their
businesses and communicate with others during COVID-19.