Financial inclusion has rightly become one of the defining development conversations of our time. Across Uganda and many parts of Africa, institutions have invested heavily in expanding access to financial services. We have celebrated growth in mobile money adoption, lending products, SACCO membership, women’s access to financing, digital financial services, insurance penetration, and entrepreneurial support programmes. These are important milestones. They matter. They change lives. But I increasingly find myself asking whether, in our efforts to expand financial access, we have unintentionally developed too narrow a view of what financial inclusion truly means. We have become very good at helping people enter financial systems. The harder question is whether we are helping them build systems around their lives that allow what they build to survive, grow, and transition sustainably over time.
One of the greatest blind spots I continue to observe is the exclusion of estate planning from conversations involving low-income earners. Very often, when engaging institutions serving low-income communities, there is a recurring assumption that estate planning is irrelevant to the people they support. The thinking often sounds something like this: “These people are struggling to meet their daily needs. Estate planning can wait.” Or sometimes even more directly: “Estate planning is for wealthy people.” I believe that perspective deserves reconsideration. Estate planning is not a luxury product for people with extensive wealth. It is not something people graduate into after crossing a certain income threshold. It is not simply about writing wills. Estate planning is about continuity. It is about ownership. It is about documentation. It is about resilience. It is about succession. It is about preserving what people spend years building. And perhaps most importantly, it is about protecting people from preventable vulnerability.
Some years ago, as part of a tradition we have maintained at TARA Advocates, we marked one of our anniversaries through community outreach. We travelled to a village in Iganga and spent time engaging approximately one hundred women. Going into that experience, one could easily have assumed that estate planning would not feature prominently in the conversation. One would have been profoundly mistaken. What stood out was not simply the volume of questions. It was the desperation for information. In fact, the time allocated was nowhere near enough. Very few women asked questions about writing wills. That was not what kept them awake at night. Their questions reflected something far deeper. “If I stay with someone for many years, am I officially married?” “If we build together but everything is registered in his name, what rights do I have?” “If my husband dies and his relatives take control of the property, what happens to me and the children?” “How do I register my business?” “How do I protect what I am building?” “How do I prepare myself so that I can grow?”
These women were not passive recipients of support. They were builders. They were raising families, running businesses, acquiring property, building homes, creating economic value, supporting extended families, paying school fees, and planning futures. Yet many were doing so while carrying enormous legal and financial vulnerability. Some had spent years building family assets alongside partners without understanding how ownership structures affected legal protection. Some had property registered entirely in another person’s name. Some described situations where a spouse dies and extended family members assume authority over property, sidelining surviving spouses and children. Others spoke about succession challenges where families distribute assets according to custom, pressure, or convenience rather than legal rights and intentional planning. Some were operating businesses informally without appreciating how registration affects growth opportunities, financing readiness, continuity, and scalability. What struck me most was this: these women did not lack ambition. They lacked access. Access to information. Access to systems. Access to strategic knowledge. Access to professionals who could help them build stronger foundations.
That experience fundamentally reinforced something I have increasingly come to believe. One of the challenges with financial inclusion conversations is that decision-makers can sometimes become detached from realities on the ground. We design interventions around people’s current circumstances rather than their future potential. We see where people are, but we do not sufficiently think about where they are capable of going. The low-income earner of today should not remain the low-income earner of tomorrow. The objective of inclusion cannot simply be survival. It must be mobility. Growth. Resilience. Scale. The woman running a small retail business today should be positioned to build something stronger five years from now. The market vendor should have pathways toward growth. The person operating a modest village enterprise should be equipped not merely to earn but to sustain.
Yet we cannot wait until people become wealthy before introducing conversations around business continuity, ownership documentation, succession planning, beneficiary planning, property rights, governance structures, or protecting family assets. By then, habits are already formed. Systems have either been built or neglected. Vulnerabilities have either been addressed or ignored. Wealth does not automatically create sustainability. Systems do. There is another assumption we must also challenge. We often underestimate low-income earners. We define people too quickly by current income levels while overlooking long-term consistency and resilience.
A small trading business in a village may not look impressive from a distance. But that same business may have educated children for twenty years, acquired land, built a home, supported an extended family, created employment, and generated stability over decades. We speak about low-income communities as though they exist in a permanent state of dependence. Many do not. Many are quietly building. Quietly growing. Quietly creating value. There is an economic dignity and capacity within these communities that institutions sometimes fail to appreciate. I am reminded of conversations around what some describe as bucket earners versus pipeline earners. Some people earn significant amounts but spend just as aggressively. Resources flow in and out rapidly. Others build steadily, slowly, and consistently. Small gains accumulated over long periods create resilience that can outlast larger but unstable financial patterns. We underestimate consistency at our own peril.
Estate planning matters because sustainability matters. Continuity matters. Documentation matters. Ownership matters. Preparation matters. Families matter. Business continuity matters. Protection matters. Financial inclusion cannot only mean access to credit. It cannot only mean opening accounts. It cannot only mean extending loans. It cannot only mean digital transactions. Financial inclusion must also include equipping people with the structures, protections, systems, and knowledge necessary to preserve progress.
Will one workshop solve everything? No. Will one intervention transform generations? No. It will take consistent investment. Education. Partnerships. Long-term thinking. Capability building. Patient engagement. But institutions genuinely committed to inclusion must begin broadening how they define value creation. Because estate planning is not for the rich. It is for people building lives worth protecting. And financial inclusion without continuity, protection, and resilience is not fully inclusion at all.