Meet Alexander Zanders: The founder revolutionising Africa's 'unbankable' farmers into a $100 billion opportunity with just a credit assessment

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...