Issue 2/Every Shilling Accounted For
Parallel Infrastructure
Across Uganda, savings and credit cooperatives, known as SACCOs, hold the money of ordinary members, and in the words of Logos Circle / Kampala, “serve as the financial backbone for millions of citizens”. What members often can’t see transparently is where that money goes inside the system. This is mostly because records are kept on paper by hand, making loan approvals and spending hard to trace. The Circle’s field research in July found that this gap was costing trust between SACCO members and the people who run them.
The Circle’s answer is to build the record on the Logos Blockchain as a ledger in which every deposit, loan, repayment, and expense is recorded as it occurs. This means any member can check it, without changing how the SACCO itself is run.
To work on some fixes, in late August, 60 people came to a conference room at Makerere University for a builders session, among them were students, developers, SACCO stakeholders, and researchers. They split into workstreams covering design, frontend, backend, and blockchain integration, and set up their development environments on the spot. A month later, in September, the Circle took the project to Victoria University, where many of the 35 who came had never used a blockchain before. The session showed them how they could help anyway, through design, research, testing, or documentation, and several said they wanted to.
As of today, the next steps are the first GitHub issues for each workstream, tests for deposits, loan approvals, and repayments, and a prototype that members can try out.
Logos Circle / Kampala, reports by Makmot256, 9 and 28 September 2026.