It is almost impossible to cheaply and reliably get money out of Uganda.

I know this because I have been trying for the past five years, you might rightly be wondering why.

I am the technical person behind one of the busiest football betting advice websites. Football betting is big business in Uganda which means of course we have plenty of Ugandan folk on our site.

Historically the site has used PayPal for everything because it was the best option for us at the time. PayPal does not operate in Uganda at all which means we had to consider other ideas.

Western Union was my first thought as I knew they operated in a majority of countries and they have online options. Again though Uganda is on the online blocklist.

Mobile payments are huge in many parts of Africa, Uganda included. My research has shown however I would be paying around 35% on each payment. For the amounts of money we are dealing with we could not afford this.

There are I am assuming reasons the likes of PayPal don’t just open up to Uganda but the first major online money sender to allow Uganda to connect to the rest of the world is going to make a lot of money.

The solution we have in place for our Ugandan friends is a stupidly manual one. Someone needs to go to a physical Western Union shop, hand over my personal details and their money. Then they need to email me their personal details and I need to manually go into a shop to claim the money. This does not scale.

Uganda isn’t the only country we have issues doing business with but it is certainly Ugandans with disposable income who are most vocal about wanting a better way to do business with the rest of the world.

If you have the knowledge or the means, help these people spend money and you will make a ton of it in return!

If you have faced similar issues and found a better solution to what I have then I am all ears.