SANDI AI Technologies has won the $50,000 GoGettaz Agripreneur Prize at the Africa Food Systems Forum Summit in Kigali, securing the female-led grand prize for its AI system that assesses smallholder farmers for loans they are unable to access through conventional lending channels.
The Ugandan startup was founded by Nabakka Sandra, who believes the conventional collateral test is the wrong measure of a farmer’s creditworthiness. According to her, farmers with productive land, years of yield history and confirmed buyers can still have their loan applications rejected because they lack fixed assets and formal employment records.
SANDI AI’s model is therefore designed to assess productivity signals rather than relying on asset registers.
However, the company has not publicly disclosed which lenders it works with, how many farmers it has assessed, its default rates or the specific data that feeds its AI model. These figures, according to the report, are more significant than the prize itself.
Alternative credit scoring for smallholder farmers remains a crowded field, with many ventures failing over time. The companies that ultimately succeed are those able to demonstrate that their loan portfolios perform after two farming seasons.
The $50,000 prize will be used to support product development and expand the company’s reach to more farming communities. Sandra said her ambition is to build a financing system based on farmers’ realities rather than the systems that have historically excluded them.
Capital continues to flow into African credit-decisioning startups based on the premise that having limited financial records does not necessarily mean a borrower is a bad credit risk.
Nigeria’s Mathesis Analytics, for instance, raised funding from Sewa Capital in August based on a similar approach.
The investment thesis is considered sound, but the real test lies in repayment data, which has not yet been made public. Until more of these companies open their books and provide evidence of their portfolio performance, the claim that AI can unlock finance for farmers remains a pitch rather than an established finding.
About The Author
