WARID and Orange Uganda have joined the Mobile Money network to offer money transfer services to their clients. MTN's Mobile money and UTL's M-Sente are already in operation with DSTV, Umeme, NWSC among others using this service for customers to settle their bills.

At Case Clinic for example, you clearly see a notice displayed at the payment point that they accept mobile money payments.  This can be helpful in a number of ways, assuming you are short on cash of course as you did not know the cost of the drugs coupled with the consultation fee, you could go ahead and call up a friend to bail you out by sending the money to your phone so that the medical bills can be settled.

Not so many people might be embracing it now but it will be a matter of time before this becomes a way of life though problems like load shedding can easily affect you if you do not charge your mobile phone.

To access your account which in this case is your mobile phone, it must be on. To receive money as well, the phone must be on because unlike SMS that can be delivered when the phone is switched on, you must use a service centre to retrieve mobile money messages.

Payway is a vending machine that can be found at supermarkets and are an ideal way of loading internet airtime for Orange network and airtime for all carriers let alone paying for DSTV, Startimes and Gotv.

It saves a lot of time for orange internet bearing in mind that if you had to buy scratch cards and you are lucky to get large denominations, you would have to enter one by one depending on what plan your on.

The payway vending machine, which does not give change or accept coins will load your airtime on the orange modem instantly in a few easy steps which takes the same time you would use on a scratch card but remember if you had Shs85,000 to load, then that will be at least a 50,000 card and a 20k, 10k card plus 5k to load.

The machine sends you an instant message on your phone to let you know that your transaction was successful on top of an instant receipt. There is a toll free number just in case you are stuck.

So if you are the type who was looking for an alternative around using many cards, then you could try the payway vending machine. You can also pay for water bills, buy an airticket with Air Uganda.

Advisory: - MTN Uganda is giving out bonus airtime when you load any amount up to 10,000. The offer is valid for the first seven times when you load from 9 to 15 Jan 2011. The message is brought to you two days after the promo has kicked off but with the remaining 5 days, you can get yourself some free airtime.