by Sharelle B. McNair
July 31, 2025
By working in Nigeria, Senegal, and Liberia — and plans to develop into Ivory Coast and Kenya — greater than 1,000 farmers use the UfarmX platform.
Fintech entrepreneur and founder Alexander Zanders determined to be proactive when the world shut down as a result of COVID-19 by promoting his crypto holdings in trade for 100 acres of Nigerian farmland to assist farmers have entry to credit score and scale their merchandise, AfroTech studies.
He launched his firm, UfarmX, in 2020, after his journey of buying and selling cell gadgets led him to Africa, the place he realized about innovation by means of direct, on-the-ground expertise. However he didn’t come from a farming background. The Baltimore native graduated from Temple College in Philadelphia, the place he based an export firm throughout a world shift within the provide chain. Buying and selling gadgets in Nigeria, the United Arab Emirates, and the Dominican Republic launched him to cryptocurrency, again when Bitcoin was solely $10.
Nonetheless, when his daughter was born in 2015, his priorities shifted. “I all the time inform individuals I did what any rational individual would do when the world feels prefer it’s ending,” he mentioned. “I began farming.”
After being impressed by a visit to Moultrie, Georgia, the place he witnessed Black laborers choosing cotton by hand, he questioned why laborers in Africa had been nonetheless doing the identical. “I began asking why Africa, with all this arable land and expertise, was nonetheless exporting uncooked items for pennies and importing completed items at a premium,” he mentioned throughout his travels to Africa between 2016 and 2019.
“The mathematics didn’t make sense.”
UfarmX grew to become extra necessary after Zanders realized banks have a tough time trusting farmers, limiting them with the right assets they want. “Banks don’t belief farmers. No knowledge. No collateral. No credit score historical past. So that they get nothing,” Zanders mentioned. However, with the usage of AI, proprietary software program, and field-level insights, UfarmX has bridged a niche for farmers to obtain extra monetary entry with live-action knowledge to construct credit score profiles.
The platform takes pictures of every farmer, then logs their GPS coordinates to trace enter historical past, crop cycles, and smartphone use.
In keeping with FoodTank, low ranges of manufacturing are sometimes attributed to the dearth of expertise in sub-Saharan Africa, which is linked to the restricted use of expertise. Zanders and UfarmX stepped in to assist the demographic advance by using native brokers, described as youth who’re a little bit extra accustomed to new tech and the way it can serve the group. “This mannequin permits us to beat each technological and belief obstacles,” the fintech founder explains.
“By leveraging the social capital of those brokers, we are able to construct belief extra simply with farmers who is likely to be skeptical.”
The system works as Fatoumata Mballo, a farmer from Senegal, witnessed her crops drop because of a wet harvest season, however utilizing UfarmX has turned issues round. The corporate helped Mballo by analyzing regional knowledge and located that post-harvest losses are frequent in her space.
By working in Nigeria, Senegal, and Liberia — and plans to develop into Ivory Coast and Kenya — greater than 1,000 farmers use the platform and have the power to buy requirements like seed and fertilizers with UfarmX’s “Purchase Now, Pay Later” capabilities. Boasting that the platform is self-funded, Zanders says he realized that numbers are crucial, however extra so concerning the impression it makes in individuals’s lives.
“It’s not simply knowledge — it’s dignity,” he mentioned.
“We’re not simply handing out loans. We’re constructing infrastructure for the individuals who feed the world.”
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