A story of a schoolgirl’s question, a father’s belief, an aunt who said yes, and an idea that refused to remain small.
In 2020, the world stopped. Schools closed, businesses struggled, household incomes disappeared almost overnight, and parents who had previously worried about tomorrow suddenly had to worry about surviving today. Somewhere in Uganda, a young girl who had only recently joined Senior One was watching it all unfold. Her name was Emily Sonia Nakabuye. She was not a banker, software engineer or experienced entrepreneur. She did not have venture capital, an office or a team of consultants. What she had was a question: “How can I make life better for me and everyone around me?” That seemingly simple question would eventually become Pesajet, a financial technology venture born not from a corporate strategy meeting but from a young person’s observation of how financial hardship was affecting ordinary families around her.
For Emily, the consequences of COVID-19 were not merely statistics reported on television. She could see how quickly disruption to income could affect almost every aspect of family life, and education became one of the problems that particularly concerned her. Schools would eventually reopen, but reopening classrooms would not necessarily mean that every child could return. Families whose incomes had been devastated by the pandemic would still have to find school fees, supplies and other necessities. Emily began imagining a financial solution that could help families prepare for that moment and make it easier for parents to finance their children’s education. She called the idea Pesajet, a name inspired by the vision of money and financial services moving with the speed and efficiency of a jet, reaching people when they needed them most. It was an ambitious idea, but at the time it remained exactly that: an unfinished idea in the mind of a schoolgirl.
One of the defining moments in the Pesajet story did not happen in a boardroom, a technology laboratory, or an international innovation conference. It happened at home. Late one evening, Emily found herself talking to her father at their gate and shared the idea she had been carrying. Families were struggling, schools would eventually reopen, and many parents would need help financing their children’s education. The vision was still incomplete, but her father listened carefully and took it seriously. That moment would become important because the first capital an entrepreneur receives is not always financial; sometimes it is the confidence of another person willing to listen, make an introduction, or open a door. Emily’s father introduced her to an opportunity that would change the direction of both the young founder and her idea. Together with her aunt, who became her first partner, Emily entered the Women in FinTech Hackathon organised by HiPipo in 2020, taking Pesajet from a conversation at home into Uganda’s growing financial technology ecosystem.
The Women in FinTech Hackathon exposed Emily and her team to a world they had previously only imagined from the outside. They encountered technologists, entrepreneurs, financial institutions, mentors and innovators developing solutions across payments, savings, credit, commerce and financial inclusion. Their assumptions were challenged, their idea was interrogated, and they began learning that creating a financial product required much more than identifying a problem. It required understanding customers, technology, partnerships, regulation, sustainability, trust and the wider financial ecosystem. Pesajet eventually placed third in the competition, but the ranking itself was only one part of the victory. The more consequential outcome was that an unfinished idea had encountered an ecosystem capable of challenging and nurturing it. Mentorship helped the team think beyond a single intervention; exposure helped them understand the possibilities within financial technology; and being surrounded by other innovators demonstrated that Pesajet did not have to remain a schoolgirl’s idea; with persistence, structure and the right support, it could potentially become a real company.
The years that followed were far less glamorous than the excitement of a hackathon. Innovation stories are often told backwards, beginning with the finished product, the award nomination, the partnership, or the founder standing on a stage, which can create the impression that success followed naturally from the original idea. Pesajet’s journey was different. After the competition came the difficult process of formalisation and legalisation, product development, learning about compliance, understanding financial services, identifying technology partners, building relationships, and earning public trust, all while operating with limited resources. These challenges were particularly significant for young founders entering a highly regulated industry in which credibility and institutional relationships matter enormously. Yet the original mission remained deeply human: to make finance more accessible to families and, initially, to help parents manage education costs so that a lack of immediate cash would not necessarily determine whether a child could remain in school. Through these efforts, Pesajet says it was able to positively impact hundreds of parents and students, giving the founders practical exposure to the realities behind the financial inclusion problem they were trying to solve.
From 2020 to 2024, Emily and her team continued to show up. Pesajet participated in competitions, innovation programmes and ecosystem engagements, joined HiPipo’s 40 Days 40 FinTechs initiative, returned to the Women in FinTech Hackathon, gained further recognition, including a Digital Impact Awards Africa nomination, and worked on integrations with MTN and Airtel as the team sought to bring its vision closer to commercially viable financial infrastructure. Each programme, conversation and partnership added another layer to the company’s understanding of the market. More importantly, Pesajet’s founders continued to listen to the people and institutions around them, and this listening gradually revealed that the financial barriers they had initially encountered in education were manifestations of a much broader African challenge.
As Pesajet interacted with entrepreneurs, merchants, farmers, financial institutions, government stakeholders and technology partners, the founders began recognising the same fundamental problem in different forms. A parent struggling to pay school fees, a farmer needing better access to financial services, a small merchant trying to receive payments, a self-employed person operating largely outside conventional financial systems, and a small business struggling with cash flow may appear to have completely different problems, but they are often connected by a common challenge: financial opportunity does not always reach people when, where or how they need it. That realisation began to change Pesajet from a solution primarily concerned with education financing into a broader financial technology proposition focused on payments, financing, and financial services for multiple segments of the economy.
This evolution matters because financial inclusion is not simply about whether someone owns a bank account or mobile wallet. Meaningful inclusion is about whether people can actually use financial services to solve every day economic problems: paying for education, receiving money, financing productive activity, trading, managing cash flow, investing in a business or responding to an unexpected expense. For millions of Africans working in agriculture, microenterprise, informal trade and self-employment, the gap between having access to a financial account and having access to genuinely useful financial tools can still be significant. Pesajet’s opportunity therefore lies not simply in creating another application or payment platform, but in understanding these gaps deeply enough to build services that fit into the real economic lives of the people and businesses it seeks to serve.
Today, Pesajet is building financing and payment solutions spanning education, agriculture, merchant services, businesses and self-employed individuals. Its ambition has expanded considerably from the school-fees problem that first inspired Emily, but its underlying purpose remains connected to the question she asked during the uncertainty of 2020: how can technology make life better for the people around us? The company’s answer is increasingly centred on creating financial tools that are accessible, transparent, practical and responsive to the realities of African consumers and businesses. In the longer term, Pesajet aspires to contribute to trusted financial infrastructure that enables people to transact, access opportunities, grow enterprises and participate more fully in the digital economy.
What makes Pesajet particularly interesting, however, is not simply the functionality of its technology or the markets it hopes to serve. Its story provides a window into a much bigger development question facing Africa: what happens when promising young innovators encounter opportunity early enough? Africa is the world’s youngest continent, and across its schools, homes, towns, and cities, millions of young people are observing problems and imagining solutions. Many of those ideas will never become businesses, not necessarily because the ideas lack potential, but because the young people behind them may never encounter the right mentor, programme, institution, first partner, investor or person willing to listen. For Emily, one of those moments happened during a conversation with her father at a gate. Another happened when her aunt agreed to build with her. Another happened when HiPipo’s Women in FinTech Hackathon provided an environment in which the unfinished idea could be tested against technology, business realities and the experience of an established innovation ecosystem.
The significance of Pesajet therefore extends beyond one FinTech company. It demonstrates what can become possible when young Africans are given meaningful access to innovation ecosystems early on, and particularly why girls should not only be encouraged to consume technology but also supported to build companies, products, and financial infrastructure. It demonstrates why hackathons, accelerators and innovation programmes matter most when they go beyond prizes and ceremonies to create pathways into mentorship, networks, markets, partnerships, regulation and investment. It also demonstrates why financial inclusion cannot be designed exclusively from boardrooms. Some of the most relevant solutions may emerge from people who have personally observed exclusion and are therefore motivated to solve problems that larger institutions may overlook.
For governments and development partners, this is where the Pesajet story becomes particularly relevant. Investments in digital skills, entrepreneurship, youth innovation, women’s participation in technology and inclusive financial ecosystems can have consequences that extend far beyond the individual participant who enters a programme. A young person exposed to the right ecosystem may eventually create jobs, build technology, serve communities, pay taxes, attract investment, and develop solutions that reach thousands, or even millions, of people. The real return on an innovation programme should therefore not be measured only by who wins on demonstration day, but by what its participants are able to build in the years that follow. Pesajet’s journey from a 2020 hackathon participant to a continuing FinTech venture illustrates why long-term ecosystem development matters.
For investors, the story presents a different proposition. Pesajet represents the opportunity to participate in developing locally rooted financial technology built around real African market needs. For banks, telecommunications companies, payment providers, and other established institutions, it represents the potential to collaborate with emerging innovators capable of reaching customer segments, use cases, and communities that conventional products may not always serve effectively. For schools and parents, its origin demonstrates the close relationship between financial inclusion and access to education. For entrepreneurs, it is evidence that the first version of a business does not have to be the final version; solving one problem deeply can reveal an entire market of adjacent problems and opportunities.
There is also a wider lesson for Africa’s technology ecosystem. The continent must become increasingly deliberate about identifying promising innovators early and supporting them for long enough to mature. Innovation ecosystems cannot only celebrate founders once they become successful. They must become better at finding them when their ideas are incomplete, when their business models are still being tested and when they need mentorship, infrastructure, capital and institutional confidence most. The next significant African technology company may not begin with millions of dollars in venture funding or an experienced executive team. It may begin with a young person who has identified a problem that everyone else has learned to tolerate.
Pesajet’s story is still being written, and it is important to acknowledge that. There is more technology to build, more regulatory and compliance work to navigate, more customers to earn, more partnerships to secure, more capital to mobilise and more evidence of scale and impact to produce. The ambition to build trusted financial infrastructure across African markets is substantial, and turning that ambition into a sustainable institution will require discipline, governance, investment, technology, regulatory alignment, and years of execution. But this is precisely what makes the next chapter worth watching. The young girl who asked a question during the uncertainty of 2020 is no longer simply imagining what Pesajet could become; she and her team are attempting to build it.
Ultimately, supporting Pesajet is bigger than supporting another FinTech product. It is an opportunity to test a much larger proposition: that African problems can be addressed by African innovators; that girls can grow from young technology enthusiasts into builders of financial infrastructure; that early mentorship and ecosystem access can translate into long-term enterprise development; and that innovation born from an ordinary person’s experience of a real problem can eventually become a platform capable of serving many more people. Pesajet began with a schoolgirl observing families struggling during one of the most uncertain periods in recent history, a conversation with her father at a gate, an aunt willing to become the first partner and an innovation ecosystem willing to give an unfinished idea a chance. It started with one girl’s question. Its opportunity now is to become part of Africa’s answer.
