Financial Inclusion for Uganda's Informal Workers

Nearly nine in ten working Ugandans earn their living in the informal economy. They are guards, market porters, fish processors, construction crews, fuel attendants, and smallholder farmers. They work hard and earn real income — yet they remain invisible to the formal financial system. Without a payslip, a verified income record, or a financial identity, they cannot access affordable credit, health cover, or the basic financial tools that formal workers take for granted.

Basket Advisory Technologies exists to close that gap. We digitise informal work — turning invisible, undocumented labour into a verified economic identity a worker owns — so that informal workers can hold payslips, build a credit profile, and access loans, insurance, and healthcare.

This brief shares early field evidence from 163 informal workers in central Uganda, sets it alongside national data and our work bringing smallholder farmers into financial inclusion through farmer cooperatives, and makes the case that financial inclusion is not only an economic goal — it is the mechanism through which health, stability, and dignity become possible.

An economy that runs on invisible workers

Uganda's own national data makes the scale unmistakable. The Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS) Labour Market Survey 2025 found that 89.2% of employed Ugandans work in the informal economy — meaning only about one in ten holds a formal job with a contract, regulated income, or social protection. Out of roughly 11.8 million employed Ugandans, more than 7.3 million work informally. Even in Kampala, the most formalised part of the country, only about a quarter of workers are in formal employment.

The Economic Policy Research Centre (EPRC) has drawn out what this means in practice: the majority of workers are employed without contracts, do not contribute to social security, and are not entitled to employment benefits — and are therefore more vulnerable to income shocks, illness, and economic insecurity than their formal counterparts.

Uganda's National Financial Inclusion Strategy 2023–2028 recognises how much of the population relies on informal financial services — savings groups, ROSCAs, and community moneylenders — precisely because the formal system has never been able to see them. The missing piece is not willingness. It is identity: a documented, verifiable record of income that a bank, insurer, or lender can trust.

What we found: a first look at 163 informal workers

To understand the financial lives of informal workers at ground level, Basket conducted a rapid field assessment of 163 casual and informal workers across central Uganda, spanning nine industries, with 40% women. Data was collected on our own offline-first mobile platform — consent-first, GPS-referenced, and timestamped.

We are candid about scope: this is an early, exploratory sample, not a nationally representative study. But the patterns are clear, they held steady across successive waves of data collection, and they align with the national picture UBOS and EPRC describe.

• The overwhelming majority had no formal record of their income — no payslip, no verifiable earnings a lender could assess.
• Many were already members of a savings group or SACCO, yet still could not access formal credit. When money ran short — often because pay arrived late or irregularly — they turned to moneylenders on costly terms, and the resulting debt deepened household strain.
• Income was frequently irregular and unpredictable, itself a barrier to formal financial services that assume a steady, documented wage.

In short: these are working, earning people who are financially active but formally invisible — exactly the population Uganda's financial inclusion strategy aims to reach, and exactly the population a verified digital income record is built to serve.

Financial inclusion is the key that unlocks everything else

It is tempting to read informal-sector hardship as a collection of separate problems — low pay here, no health cover there, debt somewhere else. Our evidence suggests they share a single root, and therefore a single leverage point.

• Access to healthcare reduces stress and protects productivity. A worker who can cover a medical bill — through insurance or affordable credit built on verified income — is not carrying the daily weight of an untreated condition. Financial inclusion is, in a real sense, a health intervention.
• Access to credit creates choice and mobility. A worker who can borrow against documented wages is not locked into a single job out of pure necessity. Financial options give people the freedom to move toward better, safer, fairer work — and that freedom is itself a form of protection.
• Verified income enables asset-building. With a financial identity, a worker can save and borrow toward the things that build long-term security — tools, a home, a child's education — rather than living permanently hand-to-mouth.
• Formalisation strengthens the whole economy. Reducing informality lifts productivity, widens the tax base, and eases the future fiscal pressure of an unprotected, ageing workforce. Financial inclusion at the worker level is national economic strategy at the ground level.

This is the heart of Basket's model: not charity, and not a hardship narrative, but a financial-inclusion pathway — digitise the work, verify the income, issue the payslip, build the identity, and let credit, insurance, healthcare, and dignity follow.

How Basket does this

• Digital payroll captures a worker's income and produces a verified, portable payslip — often for the first time in their working life.
• A financial-identity and scoring layer turns that verified income into a credit profile a lender can assess — beginning with the lowest-risk, most documentable group: salaried workers with steady earnings, with a deliberate focus on women, the majority of informal employment and the least served by formal finance.
• A pathway to products — credit, insurance, and health cover — that a documented financial identity unlocks.

We are already building this in the real economy. Through our engagement with the Uganda Farmers' Federation (UNFFE), we are extending the same financial-inclusion principle from urban casual workers to smallholder farmers across Uganda's agricultural value chains.

Through the Uganda Farmers' Federation, Basket is currently working with 30 farmer cooperatives around the country, with a pilot that aims to reach over 100,000 smallholder farmers. The model is the same one that works for urban workers, applied to agriculture: register the farmer at the cooperative and collection-point level, digitise and verify their income and produce deliveries, and open the door to formal financial services — affordable credit, agricultural insurance, market linkages to offtakers and exporters, and, over time, payslips and social protection. This is how a smallholder coffee, cocoa, or grain farmer, historically invisible to any formal register, gains a documented financial identity and becomes creditworthy for the first time.

This agricultural work runs on Basket's Jirani platform, which registers farmers and handlers at the collection point, geo-references origin, and turns an informal sourcing base into a structured, verifiable record — the same record that supports coffee traceability and deforestation-regulation compliance while bringing farmers into financial inclusion. Read more about how Jirani traces Uganda's coffee supply chain →

Working with

Our partners

We are building financial inclusion alongside institutions that reach Uganda's informal and rural workforce — in banking, farming and financial technology.

Banking partner

Uganda National Farmers' Federation