Personal Blogs

 Having read the website of Xdelia (http://www.xdelia.org/) I was thrilled with their innovative idea as if the website targeted me as an individual and my country Uganda at large. I have been noticing that by virtue of our communitarian culture and upbringing at times we have indefinite number of relatives. However, in a current cash economy, this creates a dependence burden where what used to be social capital is now a formidable social cost. This is mixed with consumerism, now rituals of marriage, burial, child birth rituals, education, technological gadgets are very expensive. Moreover, community makes it imperative to contribute. On a personal basis, I often spend without saving at times even get debts just to help. It is possible to be too kind and give away whatever one has and end up poor to help oneself. In other words, emotions of either fear, love or sympathy overrule us in financial decision-making process. Based on the above, I consider the initiative of xdelia very innovative. For it opens mental windows for us to think sustainably and out of the box. This concurs with Jansen and Weaver (2008) argument that innovation is necessary for sustainability and calls for not only interdisciplinary working but also transdisciplinarity, interagency working and stakeholder engagement. In the same way, xdelia to employs a multidisciplinary approach which includes financial trading, quantitative finance, psychology of finance, learning technology design and evaluation, experimental psychology, neuroeconomics, experimental economics, physio-economics, psychophysiology, sensor engineering, game development, and financial capability. Xdelia thus takes an integrated approach to build people’s potential in the areas of financial management by facilitating behavioral change. This would be a very good innovation in Uganda for we have a lot of resources but have poor financial management right from national to individual level. xdelia innovation would help us get out of poverty caused by financial mismanaged and failure to enable business sustainability. This certainly requires behavioral changes which xdelia starts with to change.