Mobile Money voting: fees, failures and payout timing

A supporter opens a nominee's page and chooses how many boosts to buy. They enter the phone number they pay from, and a payment request goes to that number. They approve it with their PIN. The platform then confirms the transaction status with the payment provider — not with the browser — and only then are the votes added and a receipt issued.

That order matters. Votes follow confirmed money, which is why a leaderboard on AfricaDecides cannot be inflated by page refreshes or scripted clicks.

A single boost starts at UGX 1,000. Larger bundles bring the effective price per vote down, which is what most serious supporters buy. Organisers see the available bundles while setting up a project, so you know exactly what your supporters will be offered.

Prompts fail for ordinary reasons: insufficient balance, a timed-out PIN entry, a network dropping the request, or a number that is not registered for Mobile Money. In every one of those cases no vote is recorded and no money leaves the supporter's wallet, so they can simply try again.

Organisers keep 70% of paid voting and livestream revenue; the remaining 30% covers payment charges and the platform. There is no setup fee and no subscription, so a project that earns nothing costs nothing.

Funds accumulate against your project. When you want them, you request a withdrawal from the dashboard, it is reviewed, and it is sent to your MTN or Airtel account. A small fixed processing fee applies per withdrawal and scales with the amount — so batching one larger withdrawal costs less than several small ones.

Keep the instruction to one line: open the link, tap vote, enter your Mobile Money number, approve the prompt. Anything longer than that gets ignored, and the number of votes you lose to confusion is always larger than organisers expect.