Since early 2020, IPA and the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) have partnered to improve understanding and measurement of consumer protection issues in mobile telecommunications and digital financial services and to test new consumer protection solutions One aspect of this partnership has been to further develop UCC’s analytical tools and processes related to consumer complaints logs. As part of UCC's regulatory requirements, all mobile network operators (MNOs) and internet service providers (ISPs) are required to submit their complaints logs to UCC on a monthly basis in order to allow UCC to monitor consumer experience and consumer protection issues.

On May 10, 11, and 14, IPA conducted a training with the UCC Consumer Affairs team in the use of Stata for data analysis. Using actual complaints datasets that were submitted from mobile network operators MNOs to UCC, the team practiced importing, merging, and saving these files in Stata; cleaning the data to prepare for use in analysis; generating descriptive statistics, such as a number of complaints by category and subcategory and average resolution times by provider; and automating these processes through the use of Stata do files. For the next several months, IPA will continue to provide direct support to the Consumer Affairs team to further their learning in this area and to incorporate these tools for data analysis into the UCC’s regular consumer protection monitoring processes.