Purpose: This review critically examines how cash handling and closely related financial management practices may be associated with business growth among youth-owned and comparable micro and small enterprises in low-income settings. It considers the relevance of recent evidence to informal urban businesses in Kamwokya, Kampala, Uganda. Approach: A structured narrative approach was used to organise a purposively selected group of empirical studies and reviews identified through targeted searches of publisher, journal, institutional repository and research-organisation pages. The paper is not presented as a systematic review: no exhaustive database search, independent screening process, formal quality appraisal or PRISMA count is claimed. Evidence is compared by design, context, practice domain and outcome. Findings: The literature points to five related practice domains: record-keeping and documentation; separation of business and household funds; internal controls and cash security; cash-flow planning and working-capital management; and mobile-money or electronic-payment use. Evidence from Uganda includes an experiment in which disbursing microfinance loans to digital accounts increased business capital and profits among female borrowers, and a survey of youth-led SMEs in Gulu that associated financial literacy and access to finance with financial performance (Nyeko et al., 2024; Riley, 2024). However, account ownership does not necessarily translate into active mobile-money use, and an electronic-payment experiment in Kenya improved access to mobile loans and reduced sales volatility without increasing sales or profits (Dalton et al., 2024; Hamdan et al., 2022). Evidence on record-keeping is promising but varies in design and context. Contribution: The review separates cash-handling practices from broader financial literacy and financial inclusion, identifies gaps in evidence about youth-owned informal enterprises in Kampala, and proposes a context-specific research agenda. The findings should be interpreted as a critical synthesis of selected literature rather than an exhaustive systematic review.
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Irene Sande (2026) studied this question.