Messaging — coming soon in Uganda
Coming soonBulk SMS, WhatsApp, voice and USSD for Uganda
A country where two wallets, a feature phone and a dialled menu still move most of the money.
The Uganda Communications Commission counted 37.8 million active mobile money users in the quarter to June 2026, moving 2.55 billion transactions in three months across two wallets rather than one. Around 58 million active device connections sit under that, and only about a third of them are smartphones. Which means a Ugandan business reaching its customers is writing for a handset with no data bundle at least as often as for an app — a message that arrives, a menu that can be dialled, a code that turns up before somebody gives up. Lineserve Messaging is being built for that: SMS, WhatsApp, voice and USSD from one API, on the account your Kampala servers already live on. It is not open yet. Join the waitlist and we will tell you when it lands and what the first release covers.
- Coming soon — join the waitlist
- SMS, WhatsApp, voice and USSD from one API
- Built for a two-wallet market and a feature-phone majority
- Quoted in shillings when it launches, on your existing account
- Data residency for Uganda's Data Protection and Privacy Act — your data stays in-country
Launching soon · Billed in UGX
Channels
Every way your customers' phones can listen
One API and one dashboard across all channels — start with Bulk SMS, add the rest as they launch.
Bulk SMS
Transactional and promotional SMS with delivery reports, two-way replies, and reach into 195 countries over direct carrier routes.
WhatsApp Business API
Rich media, message templates, and two-way conversations on the channel your customers already use.
Voice
Programmatic calls and IVR menus from your applications — announcements, verifications, and call flows.
USSD
Interactive menus that work on every handset with no data or smartphone required — built for reach.
Airtime
Send airtime top-ups and rewards to any number via API — incentives, refunds, and disbursements.
OTP & 2FA
One-time codes over SMS, WhatsApp, or voice with smart fallback — verification that actually arrives.
Channel availability and rates will be announced at launch — talk to sales for early access.
The market
Two networks, two wallets, and a handset that may not have data
Uganda is a duopoly, and it is the fact that shapes every list you will ever send here. MTN Uganda and Airtel Uganda hold more than 90% of mobile subscriptions between them, roughly balanced, with a set of smaller licensed operators behind them. There is no dominant single network you can design around, so a plan that works beautifully on one of them is a plan that works for about half your customers. Every sentence about reaching Ugandans needs both names in it, and so does every reconciliation report.
The wallet market has the same shape and it is the reason messaging matters commercially here. MTN Mobile Money and Airtel Money are two separate systems with two separate integrations, and a business collecting from Ugandans is confirming payments, prompting for authorisation and chasing failures across both. The UCC's registered mobile money base stood at 58.7 million with 37.8 million active in the quarter to June 2026. Every one of those transactions is a moment where somebody expects their phone to tell them what happened.
Then look at what they are holding. Of roughly 58.3 million active device connections, about 20.3 million are smartphones — the rest are feature phones and basic phones. Active mobile internet subscriptions numbered 19.7 million in the quarter to June 2026, at 3.7 GB per user per month and an average monthly data spend around UGX 10,841. A data bundle is a purchase somebody makes deliberately, and it runs out. A dialled menu and a text message do not need one, which is why USSD in Uganda is not a fallback for people who could not afford an app — it is the primary interface for a large share of the country, and it has been for years.
The regulator is the Uganda Communications Commission, which licenses the sector and publishes the quarterly market data this page draws on. What may be sent to a Ugandan handset, under whose name and on what basis, is decided in Kampala rather than in Nairobi, Dar es Salaam or Lagos, and the four countries do not share a rulebook. Bring your requirements to the waitlist conversation and they get worked through properly rather than assumed.
37.8M
Active mobile money users (UCC, quarter to June 2026)
2.55bn
Mobile money transactions in that quarter
>90%
Share of mobile subscriptions held by the two largest networks
~20.3M
Smartphones among roughly 58.3 million active device connections
Write for the two-wallet reality, not around it
The commonest tell that a message template was written for another market is that it names one wallet. In Uganda a payment confirmation that only makes sense to an MTN Mobile Money customer reads as broken to an Airtel Money customer, and vice versa — and both are looking at the same screen after the same failed payment. Templates, support scripts and reconciliation exports all have to carry both from the first day.
English is the language of business, and the country has many others
English is an official language and the working language of business, education and law, which makes Ugandan template design simpler than in some markets nearby. It does not make it trivial: a message going to a farmer group in the west and a message going to a treasury team in Kampala are not the same message, and the version somebody actually reads is the one worth testing.
Payments
Settled in shillings, on the rails Uganda already uses
Uganda pays with its phone first and its bank second, and Lineserve invoices Ugandan accounts the same way: MTN Mobile Money, Airtel Money, bank transfer or card, all in Uganda Shillings. Messaging will bill on that account rather than on a separate one, so it lands on the same statement as the servers behind it.
Both wallets, because half a country is not a market
MTN Mobile Money and Airtel Money are both accepted, in shillings. A wallet is the shortest route from a decision to a working account for a small monthly line, and supporting only one of them would mean supporting roughly half of Ugandan business.
Bank transfer for anything with an approval behind it
The rail a Kampala finance office reaches for on an invoiced purchase, and the natural choice once a messaging volume commitment is large enough to need a signature. Billed in shillings throughout, with a reference your accounts team can reconcile against the Kampala clearing rails they already use.
Card, without the foreign transaction
Visa and Mastercard work for the teams that prefer to keep a card on file, charged in shillings — so nothing converts, no international transaction appears on the statement and no bank adds a foreign-transaction fee. Card use in Uganda concentrates in the urban banked segment, which is exactly where a finance department sits.
Messaging carries no published rate card before launch — ask [email protected] to be told first. Displayed prices across the site exclude VAT; Uganda's 18% is shown separately at checkout.
The platform
Built for delivery, not just sending
Carrier routes, receipts, retries, and regulatory filings — the unglamorous parts of messaging, handled.
Direct carrier connections
450+ direct routes into 195 countries — messages take the short path, not the grey route.
Two-way messaging
Inbound replies stream to your webhook in real time for surveys, support, and confirmations.
Real-time delivery reports
Per-message delivery receipts with failure reasons, and automatic retries up to three times.
Message scheduling
Queue campaigns up to six months ahead, in any timezone, from the dashboard or API.
Sender ID management
We file registrations with the regulator in each market and keep them current.
Compliance built in
GDPR-aligned, built for Kenya's DPA and Nigeria's NDPR, with automatic DND filtering for promos.
REST API & 7 SDKs
PHP, Python, Node.js, Java, C#, Go, and Ruby — most teams send their first message within the hour.
Campaign tools
Contact groups, templates, and per-recipient personalization without writing code.
99.95% uptime
Redundant delivery infrastructure across data centres, with automatic failover.
Regions
Kampala is home. The other three are a border you choose to cross.
Deploy in ug-1a and the machine is in Kampala, in the country its users are already standing in. The region is chosen per instance rather than per account, so nothing about this decision is permanent or global: a production database in Kampala, a build runner wherever is convenient, a backup target somewhere else entirely, all on the same key and the same API.
The other three are Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Lagos, on that same account, the same API and the same shilling invoice. Here is where a Ugandan buyer has to read the map differently from everyone else on it. For a business in Nairobi, ke-1a is home. For you it is abroad twice over: a copy of Ugandan personal data held there is a transfer out of Uganda that belongs in your section 19 record, and a request served from there still crosses the border at Malaba or Busia before it reaches your customer. Regional is not the same word as local, and Uganda is the market where the difference is easiest to see.
That said, the corridor is real and some businesses genuinely live on it. Trade moves between Kampala, Kisumu, Nairobi and Mombasa; the crude pipeline out of the Albertine region runs 1,443 km to Tanga on the Tanzanian coast; freight, agri-export, logistics and contracting firms bill customers in three countries. When your operation is actually in two markets, tz-1a or ke-1a stops being a distant region and becomes the second half of your own footprint. And when what you want is somewhere to put a standby, a replica or an offsite copy, another region on the same account is a configuration change rather than a second supplier to onboard.
Uganda
Kampala
~3 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Uganda
Kenya
Nairobi
~2 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Kenya
Tanzania
Dar es Salaam
~6 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Tanzania
Nigeria
Lagos
~4 ms
typical, within metro · Data stays in Nigeria
Use cases
Built for what you're building
OTP & 2FA
One-time codes for banking, fintech, and SaaS logins — delivered in seconds, with fallback.
Marketing campaigns
Opt-in promotions with personalization, scheduling, and automatic DND filtering.
Alerts & notifications
Transaction confirmations, security alerts, and outage notices the moment they happen.
Reminders
Appointments, payments, and renewals — fewer no-shows and late payments, on autopilot.
How it works
First message in under an hour
Create an account
Sign up and get sandbox API keys with free test credits — no card required.
Register your sender ID
Send us your business details and we file with the regulator in each market for you.
Send from anywhere
One REST call or the dashboard — delivery reports stream back to your webhook.
Uptime SLA
99.9%
- DDoS filtering is included, and so is the traffic
- Service credits applied automatically when we miss the SLA
- Measured monthly, per region, on network and power availability
Support
East Africa Time all year, and a queue that already knows Uganda
Two channels with two different jobs. A signed-in ticket arrives already carrying the account, the region and the instance, so the first reply is about the fault rather than about which machine you meant. [email protected] is the commercial door: a quotation against a purchase order, transfer details ahead of a payment run rather than during it, a billing account configured with your TIN and registered name before the first invoice, and the SLA terms and credit process in writing while you are still choosing.
Ahead of both sits status.lineserve.net. A region-wide event is published there while a reply is still being typed, and thirty seconds on it turns "the site is down" into "my instance is unreachable and the status page is clear" — a different ticket, and a far shorter one.
What that ticket should carry, in the order it is read: the region and the instance, the EAT time the behaviour started, the last thing that changed before it, the actual error text rather than a description of it, and whether it reproduces from more than one Ugandan network. That last one carries more weight here than almost anywhere. Uganda is a two-operator market, and an MTN handset, an Airtel handset and an office fibre line disagreeing about your service is a completely different fault from all three failing together — it is worth thirty seconds of your time and it can save an hour of everyone's.
Uganda runs on East Africa Time, UTC+3, and has never observed daylight saving, so a change window agreed in EAT means the same thing in January and in July. You share that clock exactly with Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and sit two hours ahead of Lagos, which matters when you are scheduling work across regions. The Ugandan commercial day generally runs 08:00 to 17:00, Monday to Friday. One scheduling detail that catches people out: a Ugandan public holiday falling on a weekend stays on that date rather than moving to the Monday, so the calendar is not the same shape as some of its neighbours'.
The last part of local support is vocabulary rather than hours. The person reading your ticket knows what an operator collections callback is and why it retries, knows what the border crossing at Malaba has to do with the traceroute you are staring at, and knows why your finance office wants a TIN on the document before the first billing run. None of that has to be explained before the actual problem can be. Buy from somewhere that has never sold into Uganda and the first twenty minutes of every serious ticket go on describing the country.
Sales
[email protected]Why Lineserve
Local routes beat global relays
Global aggregators relay African traffic through whoever is cheapest this week. Direct carrier connections and local registrations are what actually move delivery rates.
Tax & invoicing
18% VAT, and an invoice a Ugandan finance team can actually use
Ugandan VAT on this class of service is 18%, administered by the Uganda Revenue Authority, and there is unusually little to interpret: URA's published list of taxable electronic services opens with web hosting, ahead of software, streaming and online advertising. Messaging will be quoted the way everything else here is, exclusive of VAT with the 18% shown separately, so the figure in your budget line and the figure on the quote are the same figure.
The document matters more than the rate. Uganda's invoicing regime is EFRIS, URA's real-time e-invoicing system, and it binds every VAT-registered business plus twelve designated sectors — information technology and communications among them. An e-invoice carries a Fiscal Document Number, a verification code and a QR code, and identifies the buyer by TIN, Business Registration Number or National Identification Number. URA treats a VAT credit claimed on a purchase unsupported by an e-invoice as non-compliance, which is why supplier documentation in Uganda is a procurement question rather than an accounting one.
Send four fields once
Your TIN, your registered name exactly as URA holds it, a billing email that reaches finance rather than an engineer, and any purchase-order, grant or cost-centre reference the document has to carry. Send them to [email protected] when you join the waitlist and the billing account is configured once instead of corrected two quarters later.
Model the volume before a rate exists
Messaging spend tracks your transaction count rather than your server count, and the model is the same whoever ends up supplying it. Work out how many confirmations an active customer generates a month, how many codes per signup attempt, how many reminders per unpaid instalment, and how much of it must reach a handset with no data bundle. When a rate card is published it drops into a model you have already built.
Data residency
A message log is a readable account of somebody's month
Consider what an alert stream actually holds. A phone number, which identifies a person. A body that frequently states an amount, a balance, an agent, a loan instalment or a payout. A timestamp on each one. Retained for a year, that is a legible record of a Ugandan's financial life, produced as a by-product of telling them what happened to their money — and it sits in the system nobody thinks of as a database.
Uganda's Data Protection and Privacy Act, 2019 — Chapter 97 of the Laws of Uganda — is enforced by the Personal Data Protection Office, which sits within NITA-U and has been operational since August 2021. Section 29 requires data collectors, processors and controllers to register, and the duty is written to reach entities outside Uganda that process Ugandan citizens' personal data. In July 2025 the Office decided a complaint against a foreign company with no Ugandan establishment on exactly that basis, finding it in breach for not registering and for failing to evidence a lawful basis for taking the complainants' data out of the country, and ordering it to do both.
Section 19 permits personal data to leave Uganda where the destination country's protection is at least equivalent to the Act, or where the data subject consents, with Regulation 30(2) requiring consent for onward transfers. There is no per-transfer permit to file, but the Office expects records of the legal basis, the safeguards and the justification to exist and to be producible during an audit or an investigation. Penalties reach 245 currency points or 2% of annual gross turnover for a corporation, and section 23 requires immediate notification once unauthorised access is reasonably suspected. A recipient list held in another jurisdiction is a standing answer you have to keep current; one held in ug-1a is an answer you never have to write.
That is what Kampala is for. Ugandan customers' data is held in ug-1a today for every live Lineserve product, and messaging is being built to run in the same place. Your obligations as controller stay yours — registration and its annual renewal, your notices, your lawful basis, your consent records — and every one of them is shorter work when the recipient list, the message bodies and the delivery logs never crossed a border.
The opt-out list is the file you cannot rebuild
Consent records and unsubscribe state are the part of a messaging estate with the longest memory and the least backup discipline. They are also the first thing anybody asks for when a complaint arrives. Whatever you send with, keep that list somewhere you control, in a form you can export, and treat it as the record it is rather than a column in somebody else's dashboard.
Procurement asks before a regulator does
In Ugandan financial services the residency question usually arrives as a vendor questionnaire from a partner bank or a supervised institution rather than as an enforcement letter — the Bank of Uganda's cyber and technology risk management guidelines have bound supervised institutions since 1 December 2024. Having a one-sentence answer about which country the logs sit in is worth more in that moment than any architecture diagram.
What Uganda sends
The message types this market actually runs on
One-time codes for wallet-linked apps
The message where a delay is indistinguishable from a failure. The customer taps resend twice, gives up, and calls a support line that is already busy. In a market where signup and authorisation are tied to a mobile money account, this is the highest-frequency message most Ugandan platforms send, and a per-network problem shows up as an abandoned signup funnel long before anybody opens a report.
Payment confirmations across two wallets
Collections and disbursements against MTN Mobile Money and Airtel Money produce a notification at every step: the prompt to authorise, the confirmation, the failure, the retry, the reversal. Two integrations means two ways for the same payment to go wrong, and the message is often the only thing the customer sees of either. Agent float alerts, settlement summaries and month-end payout runs sit in the same stream.
USSD menus for SACCOs and Tier 4 microfinance
Institutions supervised by the Uganda Microfinance Regulatory Authority serve members who very often do not have a smartphone and would not spend a data bundle on a balance enquiry if they did. A dialled menu — balance, mini statement, loan status, repayment — works on every handset in the country and costs the member nothing in data. For a great many Ugandan members it is the only interface the institution has.
Cooperative payouts and agricultural extension
Coffee is one of Uganda's leading export earners, and the messaging around it runs on the harvest calendar rather than the working week: delivery weights confirmed at the buying station, payout notifications to a farmer's wallet, prices and collection dates announced to a group, traceability prompts for EU-bound consignments. Recipients are upcountry, often on a basic handset, and often not reachable any other way.
Field data collection and beneficiary communication
Structurally heavy in Uganda's buyer mix, with programme offices in Kampala and operations running out of Gulu, Arua and beyond. Two-way SMS surveys, appointment and immunisation reminders, cash transfer notifications, and messages to households in districts where a smartphone is the exception. Consent, opt-out and language are not compliance decoration on this workload — they are the workload.
Schools, universities and results
Registration windows, fee reminders to parents, term dates, and the results day that turns a quiet system into a national event for a few hours. RENU connects Uganda's universities and the load arrives all at once; parents and students both need telling, and the parent is usually the one on the feature phone.
Logistics, utilities and appointment reminders
Dispatch and delivery notifications, meter and billing reminders, insurance renewals, clinic and service appointments. Unglamorous, high volume, and the difference between a customer who turns up and one who does not — which is why this traffic is usually the first thing a Ugandan business measures a supplier on.
Tourism confirmations, mostly to people abroad
Around 1.65 million international arrivals and roughly USD 1.7 billion in receipts sit behind Uganda's operators and lodges, and their guests are largely overseas. Booking confirmations, permit and itinerary updates and pre-arrival instructions go out on whichever channel the guest actually reads — which is frequently WhatsApp rather than SMS, and occasionally a voice call when a date moves.
When it lands
What moving would look like
From an aggregator you already use
Nobody swaps a live authorisation-code path on a Tuesday, and nobody should. The realistic shape is parallel: keep the existing supplier for the traffic that must not blink, move one low-stakes stream first, and compare what comes back on both networks rather than in aggregate. The work in between is known and worth starting early. Normalise your numbers to one format, because Ugandan lists carry the 07 form, the 256 form and the +256 form of the same person. Inventory your templates and which system emits each. And carry your opt-out and consent records across intact — that is the one file nobody can reconstruct.
From a platform billed in dollars abroad
This is the argument that lands hardest with a Ugandan finance team. Messaging spend scales with your transaction count, so a supplier billing in a foreign currency turns your busiest month into your worst exchange-rate month, twelve times a year, on a line nobody budgeted to move. Settling in shillings by wallet, transfer or card removes that, keeps the charge off the international side of a statement, and brings the recipient list and the delivery log into the country the rest of your data already sits in.
Messaging is not open yet, so none of this is a switch anybody can make today. Join the waitlist at [email protected] and we will tell you when it is ready and what the first release covers.
FAQ
Questions, answered
Transactional messages — OTPs, confirmations, notifications — are exempt from Do-Not-Disturb registries and deliver around the clock. Promotional campaigns require opt-in and are automatically filtered against DND lists where they apply.
We file the paperwork with the regulator for you. In Kenya, Communications Authority approval typically takes 2–3 business days once your business documents are in; Nigeria and Tanzania follow their own regulators with similar handling.
160 characters for standard GSM text, 70 for Unicode (emoji, Arabic, and other scripts). Longer messages concatenate automatically, up to 6 parts.
Yes. Two-way messaging delivers inbound replies to your webhook in real time — for surveys, support conversations, and confirmations.
Real-time delivery receipts stream to your webhook with per-message status. Failed messages retry automatically up to three times, and you're not charged for messages that never deliver.
Yes — schedule messages up to six months ahead, in any timezone, from the dashboard or the API.
A REST API with SDKs in seven languages — PHP, Python, Node.js, Java, C#, Go, and Ruby. Most teams send their first message in under an hour, starting in a sandbox with free test credits and no card required.
Yes. GDPR-aligned with in-country data residency, built for Kenya's Data Protection Act and Nigeria's NDPR, with DND registry filtering applied to promotional traffic automatically.
No. Messaging is in development — no checkout, no rate card, nothing to log into yet. Join the waitlist at [email protected] and you hear from us when it opens.
There is no published date. The waitlist hears first, with a plain account of what the first release covers and what follows it.
Email [email protected] with the channels you care about, the kind of messages you send and a rough monthly volume. That last figure is the useful one — it shapes what ships first.
Bulk SMS, WhatsApp, voice and USSD from one API and one dashboard, alongside airtime top-ups and one-time codes with fallback between channels. Which of them ships first, and in what order, is what the waitlist will be told first.
Rates are announced at launch, in Uganda Shillings. There is no messaging price on this site today, and any figure you were quoted elsewhere is somebody else's.
Reaching every network a Ugandan customer might be on is the problem this is being built around. MTN Uganda and Airtel Uganda carry more than 90% of active subscriptions between them and neither is ignorable, and the smaller operators' subscribers are somebody's customers too. How that coverage is delivered will be published when the product opens.
Sender identity is regulated country by country and the rules differ between Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria. Bring your requirements to the waitlist conversation — the brand you want to send as and the markets you send into — and the team will go through what applies at launch.
Enormously. Only about 20.3 million of roughly 58.3 million active device connections are smartphones, active mobile internet subscriptions stood at 19.7 million in the quarter to June 2026, and a data bundle is a deliberate purchase that runs out. A dialled menu works on every handset and costs the person dialling nothing in data. For SACCO members, farmer groups and a large share of upcountry customers it is the interface, not the fallback.
Because your recipients are split roughly in half between two networks and two wallets, so anything that behaves differently between them affects half your customers at a time. It changes how templates are written, how failures are reported and how reconciliation is read — and it is the single most common way copy and systems written for a neighbouring market get Uganda wrong.
That is what ug-1a is for. Kampala is where Ugandan customers' data is held today for every live Lineserve product, and messaging is being built to run there too. Recipient lists, message bodies and delivery logs are personal data under the Data Protection and Privacy Act, and holding them in-country gives you residency for it.
Not a permit, but a justification you can produce. Section 19 allows a transfer where the destination country's protection is at least equivalent to the Act or where the data subject consents, and the Personal Data Protection Office expects records of the legal basis, the safeguards and the justification to be available for inspection during an audit or an investigation. Keep the list and the logs in Kampala and that question does not arise for them.
It settles the location, which is the part a hosting provider supplies. Registration with the Office and its annual renewal, your notices, your lawful basis, your consent and opt-out records and your breach notification under section 23 stay with you as controller.
In Uganda Shillings, by MTN Mobile Money, Airtel Money, bank transfer or card, on the same account as everything else you run here. Nothing converts and no international transaction lands on the statement.
The contracting entity is LINESERVE, INC. What is in Uganda is the infrastructure: region ug-1a in Kampala, billing in shillings, and data held in the country.
Uganda runs on East Africa Time, UTC+3, all year with no daylight saving — the same offset as Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, two hours ahead of Lagos. Reach the team at [email protected] or through the ticket system on your account.
Customer references are available under NDA for the products that are live today. Tell [email protected] what you are building and the team will arrange the closest match.
Every channel, one API — launching soon
Bulk SMS leads the way, with WhatsApp, voice, USSD and airtime to follow. Talk to us to reserve early access.
Launching soon · Sandbox with free test credits · Billed in UGX