Uganda’s operators have handled in excess of Ush1 trillion (US$380 million) in transactions since they first launched mobile money services in 2009, according to the annual report of Bank of Uganda, the country’s central bank. A number of the country’s mobile operators including MTN Uganda, Uganda Telecom (UTL) and Airtel offer such services.  Last month MTN Uganda said that US$195 million has passed through its MobileMoney service since its launch in March 2009, indicating that is the country’s market leader in this area. The operator is the dominant force in the country's overall mobile market. MTN Uganda also said last month that it has a total of 890,000 MobileMoney subscribers, which is equivalent to 16 percent of its entire base.

However, the scale of the mobile money market in Uganda pales in comparison with recent figures published by the Central Bank of Kenya which show that the country’s dominant operator Safaricom transacted a huge Sh727.8 billion (US$8 billion) last year through its M-Pesa mobile money service. M-Pesa is acknowledged around the world as a flagship mobile money deployment but the extent to which its performance exceeds those of Uganda’s mobile operators is still striking.