E-Wage: A Revolutionary Solution to Paying Casual Laborers in Uganda
Ronald Akuayo, a casual laborer working with Kampala Serena Hotel as a kitchen steward in Uganda was tired of waiting in long lines to be paid by his employer. He recognized this as a major concern for many casual laborers in the country.
Casual laborers in Uganda face a number of challenges, including low wages, lack of job security, and limited access to social protection. Most enterprises pay their employees at the end of the day or week, and the employees have to wait in enormous lines to get paid.
Inspired by this, he developed e-wage, an online platform where casual laborers can get their payments directly on their mobile phones.
According to a 2020 report by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics, Uganda is home to 2.6 million casual workers, accounting for 18.6% of the employed population. The sectors of agriculture and construction are the leading employers of casual laborers in Uganda closely followed by manufacturing, transportation, and domestic work.
MTN Mobile Money (Momo) in partnership with Outbox Hub launched the MTN MoMo API Hackathon to enable developers based in Uganda to offer financial and transactional applications innovations using the MTN Mobile Money (MoMo) API platform. Having learned about this from the official Outbox Twitter platform, Ronald took his chance and pitched his idea about an online payment platform, e-wage to enable companies easily create wage payment sheets.
Following a series of events including the info-session, the idea submission, shortlisting of ideas submitted, the top 12 event, the prototype submission phase, and the pitch day event during which an independent panel of judges awarded the e-wage team USD 5,000 in seed funding.
Ronald has since used the USD 5,000 to host the back end of his web application on Digital Ocean for $15 per month and the front end on Vercel for $20 to $25 per month. He also hired another developer to assist him.
Having firsthand experience with the struggles of a temporary laborer, he imagined that with e-wage, casual laborers would no longer have to wait in huge lines to get their paychecks. They would receive their money straight on their cell phones, no matter where they were, removing the requirement for them to visit their company to collect their wages. The technology would also enable businesses to track their expenditure on temporary workers by maintaining a database of all payments made to them.
e-wage can be accessed online at https://www.e-wages.com. After accessing the platform, companies can upload their employee register and e-wage will enable them to calculate both the employees’ salaries depending on the time for which they worked as well as issue a bulk payment to all the employees on the register after payments have been approved.
To address security concerns, Ronald implemented mechanisms to avoid data duplication, guaranteeing that one person could only register with one phone number. The technology also guarantees that businesses sign up with their email addresses and has a log-out option in place to prevent illegal access to the system.
E-wage has been tested by Lightline Research which pays part-time employees to complete surveys. Despite the fact that the system has not yet been integrated with the MTN MoMo API, the company can utilize e-wage to compute how much each worker is paid depending on the number of successful surveys completed.
Ronald is already receiving favorable comments from the company he tested it with as he waits for e-wage to integrate with MTN’s API and make the system fully operational. They recommended that e-wage include the capability of transmitting payments straight to workers’ phone numbers.
He is optimistic about the future of e-wage, and the influence it will have on the lives of Ugandan casual laborers since it will eliminate the challenge of having to wait in queues to get paid after a long day at work. Ronald is proud of what he has accomplished with the seed funding he has received, and he thanks the MTN Momo API Hackathon and Outbox Hub for making his dream a reality.
