Luweero

From the window of our car, Luweero didn't look like much more than a few brick storefronts with painted advertisements for MTN and Sadolin coloring the horizon. There are plastic cafe tables with men drinking cokes under umbrellas, chickens pecking at rubbish piles scattered here and there, and children running errands to the store, shuffling along the road holding tomatoes or chapatis. But after talking with Robert, one of our best salesmen at Fenix, I realized Luweero is a town with a lot of political history.

Painted brick storefronts

In 1981, the National Resistance Army, headed by now president Yoweri Museveni, began the guerrilla bush war in opposition to the Obote regime, seeking support from rural Ugandans. Obote responded with efforts to quell sympathizers - looting, internment camps, and mass killings in what is now the Luweero Triangle. This isn't some distant history lesson. This is brutality that was very real to people in Luweero. And that is unnerving. Robert lost his dad when he was forcibly recruited to fight for Museveni during the Bush War. Robert's oldest son was orphaned by these killings and adopted into his family.

But you would never know that if you were just looking around town today. Things are quiet and calm in the hot afternoon sun. Most of the economy in Luweero is derived from farming. I met Joe, who referred to himself as Trader Joe (so weird to get those references here). He plants basil and celery and broccoli - all very hard crops to grow in comparison to corn, which is much more typical. He also grows sweet potatoes, but not the common white and purple variety here - the western bright orange sweet potato. When I asked Joe how he even got the seed potatoes to start, he said he has a friend in Mexico who sent them to Uganda and Joe now makes a good amount of money selling the potatoes to expats, who can't get them anywhere else. Joe hates the potatoes. In fact, he really didn't like most of his unique crops, but profit is profit!

But the real reason we were in town was to test user perception of our lighting systems

Testing perception of kit lighting...
with some very sophisticated duct tape anchor points

and to gauge our customers' interest in the idea of a credit score made available through Fenix solar loans. This project is my "baby" right now at Fenix. The analytics and code behind building the score is already exciting for me, but I had been hesitant about whether our customers would really understand what a credit score is and how it can be used. If somebody has very little exposure to finance, do they understand the terms of a loan or do they just pay what you charge them? Can we make the credit score something they can understand and work to improve?

The short answer to those questions is: people understand what a loan is, they understand credit, and they are very excited to have a means to control their financial reputation.

Take Joe for example. He farms on land that he rents in a swampy area nearby the primary school. He is doing well, but has rent to pay to a landlord who is always considering taking back the land next season. That's a lot of stress for Joe, who already learned how to grow on this land and has his crops seeded there. So when an agricultural loan through Fenix becomes a possibility, Joe's eyes light up as brightly as the solar lamp next to him. A credit score would allow Joe to use his solar loan with Fenix as a way to move away from dependence on his landlord's whims. A credit score will be a game-changer for so many of our customers, and they know it.