AI-Driven Personal Budgeting and Financial Literacy Enhancement for University Students in Uganda
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Date
2026-06-01
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Uganda Christian University
Abstract
Uganda’s university students face a critical financial management challenge. Despite mobile money reaching 33.8 million registered accounts and daily transaction values exceeding UGX 1.2 trillion, fewer than 25% of students aged 18–30 maintain any form of personal budget, and only 34% demonstrate basic financial literacy. Existing global applications such as Mint, YNAB, and Wallet are designed for structured banking environments and cannot parse the unstructured receipt images, nor do they recognise culturally relevant expenditure categories unique to Ugandan student life. This project presents UniGuard Expense Tracker, an Progressive Web Application (PWA) that integrates artificial intelligence, Receipt OCR parsing, predictive budgeting, and gamified financial education to improve personal financial management and literacy among university students in Uganda. The system implements a Receipt OCR Scanner pipeline with OCR and Random Forest classification to automatically categorise transactions into 18 locally meaningful categories. A hybrid Random Forest anomaly detection architecture optimised via Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) provides accurate spending forecasts from limited historical data. A gamification engine grounded in Self-Determination Theory delivers points, badges, leaderboards, and daily challenges, while a financial literacy Gemini AI Companion provides
context-aware financial coaching. Evaluation of the system produced strong results across all three objectives. The Receipt OCR scanner achieved an overall parse success rate of 96.4% on Ugandan mobile money receipts,
while the Random Forest transaction classifier reached 89.2% accuracy across 18 culturally localised expenditure categories. The PSO-tuned forecasting model recorded a Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 8.9%, outperforming both ARIMA and GRU baselines. Usability testing with 25 Uganda Christian University students yielded a System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 83.4, placing the application in the “Excellent” usability category. An 8-week pilot
with 97 students demonstrated a statistically significant 23.9 percentage point gain in overall financial literacy (p < 0.001), with the largest improvement recorded in budgeting confidence (+27.5%). The 28-day user retention rate reached 67.4%, confirming sustained engagement with the gamified learning framework. The total development cost remains within UGX 3,190,000, making the solution practically achievable in the Ugandan tertiary context.
Description
Undergraduate