Although the number of deposit accounts with MDIs has increased five fold since 2006, as shown in table 1, it is still small in comparison with the number of deposits accounts held in commercial banks; commercial banks held more than five times as many deposit accounts as MDIs in 2014.
As such MDIs have only made a relatively modest contribution to reducing financial exclusion over the past decade. It appears that the business model of MDIs, which involves a high volume of small loans and deposits, has not always been successful in Uganda, possibly because the operating costs have been too high.