SANDI AI Technologies received the $50,000 GoGettaz Agripreneur Prize at the Africa Food Systems Forum Summit in Kigali, capturing the female-led grand prize for an AI system that qualifies smallholder farmers for loans that they cannot obtain through traditional channels.
Nabakka Sandra started the Ugandan startup. Her premise is that the collateral test is the incorrect test. Farmers with productive land, years of yield history, and confirmed customers continue to fail loan applications since they have no fixed assets or a formal job record, therefore SANDI’s methodology is designed to analyze productivity signals rather than asset registers.
What the company hasn’t revealed publicly is whose lenders it works with, how many farmers it has rated, what its default rates are, and what data is used to feed the algorithm. These stats are more important than the reward itself. Alternative credit scoring for smallholders is a crowded industry with a long graveyard, and the winners are those whose portfolios perform after two seasons.
The $50,000 will be used to develop new products and reach out to additional farmers. Sandra says her goal is to create finance that is tailored to farmers’ circumstances rather than the systems that have excluded them.
Capital continues to flow to African credit-decisioning startups on the same premise: a tiny file does not imply a high risk. Nigeria’s Mathesis Analytics raised funds from Sewa Capital in August on the basis of its thesis. The bet is sound. The proof is in repayment data that has yet to be disclosed, and until a few of these companies release their books, “AI unlocks finance for farmers” will remain a pitch rather than a discovery.
