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SMS PAY - Pay School Fees, government services, and Businesses using SMS
SMS Pay for Schools;
A parent uses a simple SMS to pay school fees from his mobile money account to a school. This doesn’t require the parent to have a smart phone with her. A parent types an SMS e.g. Pay 193 10000 2020s10 and send to a short code 6115. The message has a school code, amount to pay and student id in it. The parent receives a mobile money pop up to approve the payment; Enters PIN and payment goes to a school.
A school bursar or director will receive a real time sms notification notifying him/her about a school fees payment for a specific child.
Similar service is available for public to pay government services and various businesses. To pay for that, one simply types Pay BusinessCode Amount and sends to same short code.
Money parents send is auto-transferred from a School wallet to the School Bank account. This means the parent/public don’t have to go to banks to affect/make payments.
Define three specific objectives that you would like to achieve with your proposal.
Our main goal is to digitize Ugandan SMEs and Schools plus advise them on to how to perform better by studying their income and expenses data. Our goal is backed up with a pillar of following objectives:
To provide a Centralized Smart Digital Wallet for a merchant/school to track all incoming and outgoing payments.
To ease cash to bank transfer for all SMEs/Schools and save time plus money.
To reduce cash theft, fraud and delayed payments by providing a Secure smart wallet thus easing Cash collection
What problems (particularly in value chain competitiveness and global disruption) are your community’s stakeholders facing due to the Covid-19 pandemic?
Long Congested Queues while paying for public e-services/school fees. Public e-services include ura taxes, passport fees, police clearance fees, police traffic fees and others. A lot of people congest and queue at banks while paying these fees; this wastes a lot of time and money. This results into a lot of congestion which isn’t good as per guidelines of COVID-19 SOPs. There is a bigger number of people paying for these fees since its one of the objectives for them to achieve their goal e.g. A parent has to pay school fees for his children to study.
What minimum viable solution(s) are you proposing to address the challenge(s) in your community?
With our solution (SMS PAY - Smart digital wallets for Merchants) one just has to stay Home; opens and creates an SMS to affect the payment to any registered merchant/school from his mobile money account. (Merchants/Schools wallets auto transfer available money to their bank accounts).
This is simple and so fast to effect payments than moving to banks.
Share your story (your narrative)
Growing up as an innovator and a parent, a faced so much difficulty in paying school fees and at the same time working under a very tight schedule. With my background technology in mobile money systems and availability of home schools to give me time to survey them;
I found out that most parents have no smart phones and indeed prefer school fees payments without going to banks. Hence development of SMS Pay. (Based on Powellpay; Powellpay is an application we worked on earlier that enables parents with smartphones pay school fees from there wallets – SMS Pay is an extension of Powellpay)
Please provide any additional relevant information that you would like to share.
SMS Pay is part of Powellpay.
Powellpay is currently being used and tested as an MVP; This means SMS Pay has a good and extensive continuation.
Hello Samuel, well done on your idea. Is this service not covered by MTN and others using their mobile money service. You will need to move quickly and get traction if this is not being provided by the telcos. I am sure you are aware of what Mpesa service has done in Kenya to change the way micro payments are done. All the best
Hi, banks have ussd codes made up for schools to provide this service how is yours different from what they are offering?
Dear Samuel, a great Idea. In 2017 I created a complete digital system for student applications for there loans. In order to apply they needed to check eligility based on their grade 12 results. We created this database in the backend and offered this using a single API on different frontends such as SMS, USSD, FB Messenger, WebSite.
Is the School Fee to be paid taken from the Airtime credit?
Hello Samuel,
Good day, the idea is good. However, how do you address security issues?
I read through your comment detailing why you can not go for USSD. I actually wanted to recommend USSD because it is more secure. Do you have any plan for additional layer of security in mind that can prevent interception?
Dear Samuel,
digitization is definitely the way to go to reduce contacts and spread of COVID-19. I did not understand the statement that the parent did not need to have a smartphone while the parent still had to send an SMS and receive a notification on mobile phone. I assume it means that the parent can use someone else's smartphone and authenticate herself/himself through the PIN code. A possible vulnerability in this case is that the owner of the smartphone can log the keys that are pressed and discover the PINs of other people. The owner of the phone can also see the SMS that was sent and identify the PIN, unless it is encrypted. You can use a series of "one-time-passwords" to avoid such vulnerability. However it is not a critical vulnerability in a community where people trust each others.
Hello i see yyou're new here Anyway this is a small piece of advice My advice Start small and build momentum, Being a social entrepreneur can be very difficult, you are constantly in a field dominated by changing dynamics, you will often face business challenges, and you have to start small and build your enterprise from the ground up. You must be resilient, realistic, and passionate about your goals and the impact you are trying to achieve. To add to your solution, I am sharing with you questions from one of our trainings that can help in refining our ideas and projects What business model will you follow to implement this idea? What methodology or strategy will you use during different processes of implementing this idea? Which are the processes you have to go through until the finalization of the idea? What means or tools do you need to implement my idea? Which are your potential collaborators, investors? I honestly suggest that before you submit your idea or project, please and ask yourself these questions and even if you have submitted their project, do remember that we still have opportunity to refine our ideas and resubmit. I hope that you find this useful. Also, please create time and take the campus online trainings as the trainings are there to help campus members understand what it is to be an entrepreneur. Consider my idea vote and comment on it Let co create Thank you
Hi Samuel i have to say this is great innovation and i love that it reduces the burden as experienced in the us of USSD. I would however like to know why you interest is with school fees payments mostly where several interventions have been offered. How do you intent to beat your competitors in the game and more importantly what consideration do you have for other sector players like SMEs who would offer a bigger market in my view... thanks and your vote for our innovation will be highly appreciated
Hi Samuel,
It's a great idea, easy to use, I hope you can make it useful to your people, keep the good work!
Hello Samuel, awesome idea and I love the fact that you want to make payment easy. You maybe in a competitive space, what is different about your solution and how secure is it from frauds. Then does it require parents to deposit money into the account they open with you? What's the difference with Mobile money like Mpesa?
how nice! Yesterday i was talking to one of the people that I am mentoring and he was suggesting something similar for landlords/tenants. No more chasing tenants whether they have paid or checking with your bank. Have you thought about testing it or asking for instance Bridge International Academies https://www.bridgeinternationalacademies.com/ whether this is something for them? Or are you targeting more the schools that are smaller in scale?
In the meantime, you may want to have a look at our idea and vote for it if yo like it: https://cocreate.itu.int/post/3496670
I have this to say Samuel. Your idea submission looks simple but very innovative. I love it! However, it seems as though there are existing platforms that serve this purpose in your area. If this is not so, kindly fly this as quickly as possible. Your idea could scale from nursery school to secondary and tertiary schools ideal for older parents that find it difficult to make use of smart devices. It also ensures students don't spend their tuition fees on trivialities or gamble with them but make payments as and when due. On another note, how do you make money? You will need to state if your app operates a freemium model or a subscription kind. You might want to add a feature that auto-generates invoices for your users to track their payments. Then go ahead and onboard schools in your community. Goodluck!
Dear Samuel,
This is actually one of the solutions we need at this point in time.
PS: Please like or give advice to my project https://cocreate.itu.int/post/3488310
Dear Samuel,
This is actually one of the solutions we need at this point in time.
PS: Please like or give advice to my project https://cocreate.itu.int/post/3488310