Your family's money no longer lives in a tin under the bed. It lives in SIM cards. MTN Uganda alone reports 14.7 million registered mobile money customers as of July 2026, and Airtel Money has been running since 2012 on...
Your family's money no longer lives in a tin under the bed. It lives in SIM cards. MTN Uganda alone reports 14.7 million registered mobile money customers as of July 2026, and Airtel Money has been running since 2012 on the second-largest network in the country. For most households, the phone is the bank, the ledger, and the vault in one device that gets lost, stolen, and borrowed.
Banks run security drills. Families almost never do. This is the family's drill: one evening, about two hours, five steps. Run it once now and then once a year, and add it to the same annual sitting as your pot review if that helps it survive.
Go line by line through every SIM in the family that holds money or receives money. For each one, answer on paper:
` SIM AUDIT SHEET Line number: ____ Network: __ Registered in whose name (verified, not assumed): ____ Holds float or savings? __ Approx balance: __ Receives income (salary, sales, remittances)? __ Who physically holds the phone: ____ Action needed: ____ `
Two facts make this audit urgent rather than administrative.
First, registration is enforced. MTN disconnected 3.7 million unregistered SIM cards in 2015 in a single compliance sweep. A money line registered casually in a cousin's name because he had his ID at the shop that day is a line that can be frozen, reassigned, or lost in a re-registration exercise, with the float inside it.
Second, and this is the question almost no family has asked: what happens to the float when the registered person dies? The wallet belongs to the name on the registration, not to whoever tops it up. On death, the balance becomes part of the deceased's estate, and the family recovers it through the operator's deceased-customer process, which requires a death certificate and proof of administration. That is months, for money the household may need in days. The practical rules that fall out of the audit:
The PIN is the entire lock. Set three household rules and say them out loud so even teenagers can recite them:
One deliberate exception, decided by the family rather than discovered in a crisis: each principal wallet's PIN is written, sealed in an envelope, and stored in the family's document box for the day its owner is unconscious or gone. Sealed, dated, and its existence known to two people. That is a continuity measure, and it is the only sanctioned copy in existence.
When a phone is lost or stolen, the money on the line is in a race between you and whoever holds the device. The family standard is one hour from noticing the loss to a frozen line. That only happens if the numbers are already written down somewhere that is not the lost phone.
Build the card tonight, one per adult, kept in the wallet and in the family file:
` PHONE-LOSS CARD for line: ____
MTN: 100 (toll-free from MTN) or 0771 001 000 from any line WhatsApp +256 772 123 100 Airtel: 100 from an Airtel line (verify and write the off-network number here today: ____) Say: "Stolen phone. Block the SIM and freeze mobile money."
and any dispute): station ____
`
The MTN numbers above are published on MTN Uganda's MoMo pages. Airtel publishes its care channels on its own site and on your SIM pack; part of tonight's drill is dialing 100 from your Airtel line, confirming the off-network number, and writing it on the card, because the card is useless if the only place the number exists is the stolen phone.
Order matters. The network call comes before the police report, because the freeze stops the bleeding and the report only documents it.
Fraudsters work in patterns, and patterns can be rehearsed. Teach the household these three by acting them out, one family member playing the scammer:
If the network's own process stalls or an agent was complicit, escalate: the Uganda Communications Commission consumer affairs line is toll-free 0800 222 777, and complaints about payment providers can go through the Bank of Uganda's help desk. Report attempted fraud to the police even when you lost nothing; patterns get stopped by reports.
Any wallet that holds family money, as opposed to personal pocket money, gets a second pair of eyes:
Two-person integrity is not suspicion. It is the same reason a shop has two keys, and it protects the trusted person as much as the money, because a reviewed account is an account nobody can be falsely accused over.
This week: run Step 1 and Step 3. List every money line and whose name it is really in, then build a phone-loss card for each adult, dialing 100 on each network to confirm and record the numbers while nothing is wrong. The drill you run on a calm Tuesday is the one that works on a bad Saturday.