Ugandans woke up this morning to a number that would have sounded implausible two years ago: one million smartphones financed by a single company.
At an event in Kampala yesterday, Watu Uganda marked the milestone for Watu Simu, its device-financing arm, alongside seven years since the company first opened for business in the country and three years since it began financing phones at all.
The speed of the climb is the real story. Watu crossed half a million devices only last year; it doubled that figure in under 12 months, with more than 250,000 phones financed in the first half of 2026 alone.
That acceleration says something about Uganda’s economy that no policy paper has managed to capture as plainly.
The country has one of the youngest populations in the world and a formal job market that cannot absorb its educated youth.
Most young Ugandans do not wait for employment; they build it, hawking goods, riding boda bodas, running small trades that live or die on two things — a working smart phone and, often, a motorcycle.
Both are expensive to buy in cash and nearly impossible to borrow for through a conventional bank, which wants land titles and credit histories that informal workers simply do not have.
Where banks see risk, Watu has built a business on mobile money footprints and digital vetting instead, turning Uganda’s near-universal use of MTN MoMo and Airtel Money into a credit history of its own.
It is a small technical shift with an outsized social effect: it lets someone with no paperwork but a reliable income buy the tool they can use to build a livelihood.
The human scale of that shift is easiest to see in individual stories.
Take for instance, Suzan, a market trader in Kampala, who financed her first-ever device through Watu Simu rather than saving for months to buy one outright.
She has since cleared most of the balance from her daily earnings, and the phone now keeps her connected to customers, suppliers and family in ways a cash purchase would have delayed for a year or more.
In Rukungiri in western Uganda, Adrine, a tailor running her own shop, paid off her phone over nine months and found the process straightforward enough that she has referred several other customers to Watu Simu herself.
Of course, neither story is dramatic. That is precisely the point – this is financing designed to disappear into ordinary life rather than announce itself.
Speaking at the event in Kampala yesterday, company officials framed the one million milestone as a floor, not a ceiling.
“Growth like this doesn’t happen by accident,” said Damien Gueroult, Watu Uganda’s Country Manager. “That kind of demand tells you people want a practical way to own a phone, not just a subsidy.”
He credited the progress to a dealer network that has grown past 300 partners nationally, now feeding a business run out of 29 branches with more than 10,000 agents and 880 staff.
Watu Credit is a leading asset financier in Africa, committed to driving financial inclusion and digital empowerment. Since 2015, Watu has unlocked over $1 billion in credit, and disbursed more than seven million loans across the ten countries where it operates.
For Uganda, there is another significant figure worth thinking about: over 6,000 boda riders who first financed a motorcycle through Watu have gone on to finance a smartphone too, stacking one productive asset on another.
Female customers make up 42 percent of Watu Simu’s million users overall, and now account for half of all new sign-ups.
In recent years, fintech in East Africa has produced plenty of headline numbers over the years.
However, few of them have translated as directly into someone’s daily bread as this one.
