Africa’s smallholder farmers sit at the centre of one of the continent’s biggest economic contradictions: they produce food and support rural economies, yet millions remain excluded from finance because lenders lack the data to assess their creditworthiness, leaving a $100 billion financing gap that new generation of agritech companies are now working to unlock.
UfarmX, an agritech company founded by Alexander Zanders, is attempting to close that gap by building a data-driven credit infrastructure that allows financial institutions to assess individual farmers and unlock financing for a market that has traditionally been considered too risky.
The company says it has already individually credit-scored more than 17,000 farmers across Nigeria, Senegal and Liberia, facilitated more than $6.8 million in agricultural commerce, and recorded a 1.17 per cent net default rate on its insured lending channel.
In an interview with Business Insider Africa, Zanders said UfarmX was built around the belief that African farmers were not unbankable but had been overlooked because the financial system lacked the tools to measure their creditworthiness.
“The problem was never the farmer. It was that nobody had built the infrastructure to assess them. Over 90% of Africa’s 600 million farmers have zero access to formal credit, not because they can’t repay, but because no one could assess them,” he said.
