Every back-to-school season plays out the same way: parents trawling markets with a photocopied list, items that cannot be found, uniform sizes that are only roughly right, and a bursar’s office swamped with cash payments. Yet families across West Africa already pay for everyday purchases with their phones. Why shouldn’t the school shop do the same?
Back to school: a spending peak for families
Supplies, textbooks, uniforms, bags: the start of the school year packs a large share of a household’s education spending into a few weeks. UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report (2021/2) points out that households carry a significant part of the cost of schooling: worldwide, roughly one family in six saves to pay school fees, and nearly 8% of households borrow to cover them.
On top of the financial burden comes a hidden cost: time. Tracking down the right edition of a textbook, coming back to exchange a uniform that is too small, queuing at the school office… For the school, back-to-school also means stock that is hard to forecast, cash to handle and complaints to deal with.
- For parents: repeated trips, shortages at retailers, and the risk of buying an item that does not match the list.
- For the bursar’s office: cash collection, manual reconciliation, and supplier orders placed without reliable data.
- For students: days, sometimes weeks, without the materials they need.
Mobile payments are already part of daily life
The context has changed profoundly. According to the GSMA State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money 2026, mobile money transactions reached about USD 2 trillion in 2025, with 2.3 billion registered accounts and 593 million accounts active every month; Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for most new accounts.
In the WAEMU (UEMOA) zone, the BCEAO counted 248 million electronic money accounts at the end of 2024, almost 19% more than in 2023. More strikingly, the number of merchant acceptance points more than doubled over the same period to over 3.7 million: paying a merchant by phone is becoming routine.
The World Bank’s Global Findex 2025 confirms the trend: in Sub-Saharan Africa, 58% of adults had a financial account in 2024, up from 49% in 2021, and 42% of adults in low- and middle-income countries made a digital payment to a merchant. In other words, many parents are already equipped to pay for the new school year remotely.
Setting up an online school shop: step by step
Moving to online ordering does not require turning everything upside down. The key is to start from each class’s official supply list and to offer the payment methods families actually use. Here is a simple approach, ideally launched several weeks before term starts:
- Validate supply lists for each class with teachers: exact references, textbook editions, quantities.
- Build the catalogue: photos, prices, uniform sizes, colour variants and clear categories.
- Decide how orders are handed over: on-site pickup at set times, or delivery where the school can offer it.
- Enable mobile and card payments to cut down on cash at the counter.
- Size your stock based on expected enrolment and track shortages day by day.
- Inform families through the usual channels (parent meetings, messages, notice boards), with clear opening and closing dates for orders.
- Track every order until it is handed over, then review after the start of term to adjust for next year.
That last step is often overlooked. Yet data from the first season (most requested items, uniform sizes, pickup times) is valuable for negotiating with suppliers and avoiding unsold stock the following year.
How SciAut Coop helps
SciAut Coop is the school’s online shop, designed for parents, students and the bursar’s office. Its features address back-to-school pain points directly:
- Catalogue: items with photos, sizes and variants, prices and categories, so parents order the right uniform or textbook the first time.
- Supply lists: each class’s official list is added to the cart in one click, with no forgotten items or wrong references.
- Ordering: online orders with on-site pickup or delivery.
- Payment: Mobile Money, Orange Money, FedaPay or bank card, reducing cash at the counter.
- Stock: quantities, low-stock alerts, incoming and outgoing movements, so the bursar can plan restocking.
- Order tracking: every order is followed through to handover, limiting complaints and missed items.
The result: families save time, the school stays in control of its lists and payments, and the bursar’s office has a clear view of what has been sold and what is still to be handed over.
Conclusion
Back to school will remain a costly time for families, but it does not have to be an obstacle course. By building on mobile payment habits that are now well established, schools can turn the supply-list chore into a simple, traceable service. Discover SciAut Coop and request a demo to prepare your next school year.
Sources
- Mobile Money accounted for $2 trillion in transactions in 2025 (State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money 2026), GSMA, 2026
- Annual report on digital financial services in the WAEMU 2024 (in French), BCEAO, 2026
- Global Findex 2025: Mobile Phone Technology Powers Saving Surge in Developing Economies, World Bank, 2025
- Global Education Monitoring Report 2021/2: Non-state actors in education, UNESCO, 2021
