Africa is currently abuzz globally due to a race for its rare earth minerals. But within the nation there lies another opportunity worth approximately $100 billion, that one man is benefiting from. Smallholder farmers on the continent produce food and support rural economies across the land, yet millions of them remain excluded from finance because lenders lack the data to assess their creditworthiness. This is what a new generation of agritech companies are working to solve.At the centre is UfarmX, an agritech company founded by Alexander Zanders that is attempting to close this gap by building a data-driven credit infrastructure that enables financial institutions to assess individual farmers and unlock a financing market that has been previously defined as too risky.The company claims 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. Zanders said to Business Insider Africa, that the company 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.“Traditional lenders that do touch this market only do group lending, and group lending is a band-aid, not infrastructure. It doesn’t scale, it doesn’t build creditworthiness, and it doesn’t unlock the $100 billion financing gap sitting right in front of us.”
A Nigerian farm that revealed a continental financing problem
UfarmX’s origin did not begin as an entrepreneurial venture, Zanders experienced the situation himself. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Zanders bought 100 acres of farmland in Nigeria as a personal project and as a tribute to his grandmother. Soon, what began as an agricultural project became the foundation for solving Africa’s largest financial challenges.While farming, he noticed that neighbouring farmers often had more experience and knowledge than he did, but their output was limited by access to inputs. “During COVID I was farming a hundred acres in Nigeria myself, and after our first harvest I saw the disparity up close: the farmers around me were more skilled than I was, but my yields were multiples of theirs for one reason — I had access to quality drought-resistant inputs and they didn’t,” he said.The issue he understood, was not the lack of farming ability but the inability of the farmers to access the resources that could improve their productivity. Zanders tested the idea by providing farmers with seeds and fertiliser on credit, allowing repayment after harvest.“In that first cohort we financed, yields tripled and revenues doubled,” he said. The results showed that farmers could repay when given the right support, while the transactions generated the data needed to build credit profiles.
Helping millions of farmers
UfarmX has developed its model in three stages. The first phase focused on direct lending, where the company financed agricultural inputs for farmers while collecting repayment and production data. However, Zanders said that direct lending could not solve the continent’s agricultural financing challenge at scale.Now, the company operates through agro-dealer retailers, allowing local businesses to provide inputs on credit to farmers approved through its scoring system. “No bank in the loop, no collateral — the farmer’s data is the collateral. Farmers repay after harvest, retailers grow their sales, and every transaction sharpens the scoring engine,” he said.The next phase is to turn that technology into a wider financial infrastructure. By the end of the year, UfarmX plans to launch a credit-scoring API that banks, microfinance institutions and development finance institutions can use to assess agricultural loan applications. “Phase one proved the credit, phase two scaled it, phase three turns it into infrastructure everyone else lends through,” Zanders said.Beyond the lending data, UfarmX says its business model is commercially sustainable, reporting gross margins of about 82 per cent and revenue growth of more than two times over the past year.Now, Zanders said that the perception of people over Africa’s agricultural sector is changing. He pointed to his participation at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he engaged with leaders from organisations including BlackRock, Circle and the United Nations World Food Programme. “Five years ago, African agriculture at a gathering like that was a development topic — a side session, a charity lunch,” he said.“This year it sat in the main conversation next to AI, climate and global trade, as an investment thesis. The numbers are forcing it: 600 million farmers on most of the world’s remaining farmable land, a $100 billion-plus annual financing gap, and food security suddenly at the top of every government’s agenda.”
Backed by Pharrell Williams
UfarmX gained further recognition after winning the 2025 Black Ambition Grand Prize, an initiative founded by musician and entrepreneur Pharrell Williams to support founders who are often overlooked by traditional venture capital. The award included investment, making Black Ambition a stakeholder in the company. Zanders said the value extended beyond the funding.“But honestly, the capital is almost the smallest part of what that relationship opened up,” he said. “Being selected plugged us into a community of founders and operators we’d never have reached otherwise, people building serious companies who now pick up the phone.”The recognition also connected UfarmX to wider business networks, including opportunities linked to luxury group LVMH through Black Ambition’s partnerships.As Africa seeks to increase food production, create rural jobs and attract investment into agriculture, the ability to identify millions of previously invisible borrowers could reshape the sector.
