Grace Ashiru
SANDI AI Technologies has won a $50,000 GoGettaz Agripreneur Prize at the Africa Food Systems Forum Summit in Kigali, taking the female-led grand prize for an AI system that scores smallholder farmers for loans they can’t get through conventional channels.
Nabakka Sandra founded the Ugandan startup. Her thesis is that the collateral test is the wrong test. Farmers with productive land, years of yield history and confirmed buyers still fail loan applications because they hold no fixed assets and no formal employment record, so SANDI’s model is built to read productivity signals instead of asset registers.
What the company hasn’t disclosed publicly: which lenders it works with, how many farmers it has scored, what its default rates look like, or what data actually feeds the model. Those numbers matter more than the prize does. Alternative credit scoring for smallholders is a crowded field with a long graveyard, and the ones that survive are the ones whose portfolios perform after two seasons.
The $50,000 goes toward product development and reaching more farming communities. Sandra says her ambition is finance built around farmers’ realities rather than around the systems that excluded them.
Capital keeps flowing to African credit-decisioning startups on the same premise, that a thin file is not the same as a bad risk. Nigeria’s Mathesis Analytics raised from Sewa Capital on that thesis in August. The bet is sound. The proof is in repayment data nobody has published yet, and until a few of these companies open their books, “AI unlocks finance for farmers” stays a pitch rather than a finding.
