At every meeting of the Kica Ber Seed Effect Savings & Loan Group, Tonny’s hands move across the shillings, counting what his neighbors have saved and tracking what they are ready to borrow.

He serves as the group’s money counter.

This means he has watched this group grow coin by coin, week by week. And after one year, what he counts has changed almost beyond recognition.

Before joining, Tonny had only heard about Seed Effect from other people. Word was spreading through his community in the Omoro region of northern Uganda: if you want any kind of help, whether from the government or elsewhere, you need to be part of a group.

Tonny listened.

When the chance came, he was trained in how to save and run a savings group and, through Seed Effect’s business training, in how to run a small enterprise well. 

When the Kica Ber group held its first meetings in mid-2025, thirty members gathered, sixteen of them women. Each began buying shares at one thousand Ugandan shillings apiece (about $0.27) and contributing to a shared social fund, the group’s safety net for emergencies. At first, the box held very little: around 22,000 shillings in savings, roughly six dollars, pooled among thirty families, but it kept growing.

When Tonny took his first loan from the group, he made an important decision.

“I should not just sit on it, because it could be wasted instead of put to good use.”

So he bought two goats for 100,000 shillings (about $27) and resold them at a profit. It was a small trade, but it worked.

That first sale became a livelihood. Tonny began buying and reselling goats at markets across the area, turning a profit each time. The savings habit and the business sense he had learned through Seed Effect were now working together, each loan repaid on time and reinvested into the next opportunity.

With what the goat business earned, Tonny bought two oxen, and they changed his farming overnight. The heavy labor that had always made cultivation hard was now carried by the team, so he expanded the amount of land he works. The oxen soon became a source of income of their own: neighbors began hiring them to plow their fields, and the rental income brought in steady money he could save and lend back to his group. The income from all of it began to cover his household’s basic needs, then his children’s school fees, and finally the medical bills that had once felt out of reach.

“I am able to pay school fees for my children, and paying medical bills has become much easier because of the business.”

By October 2025, three months after those first lean meetings, the group Tonny helps lead had already transformed. Members had bought 347 shares. Their savings had grown from about 22,000 shillings to 347,000 (roughly $94), a sixteenfold increase in a single quarter. And the money was no longer sitting still. Twenty-six loans were out in members’ hands, worth 325,000 shillings (about $88), funding businesses and farms across the community. The group had generated 228,000 shillings in profit (about $62), which will return to its families at share-out, and the social fund, their emergency cushion, had doubled. Not one Member had dropped out.

Tonny counted all of it.

When Tonny looks back, the distance from where he started is easy to see, and it keeps him working. Whatever he borrows from the group, he makes sure to use well and repay on time, rather than waiting to be asked on the payback day.

“My life is not what it was before Seed Effect. When I look at how far I have come from where I started, I see a big difference in my life.”

“My life is good now, and I am no longer struggling.”