Alexander Zanders is building the Equifax of African agriculture with UfarmX
Zanders dreams of his startup one day becoming the foundational credit tool to facilitate successful farmer lending across Africa.
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Zaidu, 67, has known no other occupation than farming since his teenage years. Yet he has very little to show for years of hard labour, cultivating lands with crude farm tools, and depending on rainfall to make his crops grow.<br />
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Whenever he harvests his crops, a large portion is wasted due to a lack of storage facilities, and the small quantity he manages to sell is bought for peanuts by middlemen who transport them to markets in other states. His farm yield has continued to decline over the years due to a lack of funds to buy fertiliser, and even when the government provides it, it is carted away by briefcase farmers.<br />
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Unfortunately, Zaidu is not alone in this struggle. <br />
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Per the FAO, over 70 per cent of Nigerians engaged in agriculture do so at a subsistence level. Despite contributing over 20% to GDP, the sector has lacked the requisite funding and willpower to transform the fortune of smallholder farmers who continue to carry the burden of food production for the nation on their frail shoulders.<br />
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Ironically, in the early 1950s and 1960s, agriculture was the bedrock of Nigeria’s economy, until the oil boom era led to its abandonment, as the ‘easy money’ from petroleum revenue became the nation’s cash cow.<br />
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It is the plight of farmers like Zaidu that keeps Alexander Zanders, founder of UfarmX, awake at night.<br />
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“I was in my 20s, and my daughter was just born,” Zanders recalls of his 2015 pivot to agriculture. “Life was moving pretty fast. It was all about the money. Then something shifted. I started actually caring about what the world would look like after I’m gone because she would be living in that world.”<br />
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After his daughter’s birth, Zanders moved from New York to Maryland. And during that transition, his Nigerian friend, Charles, invited him to the Sunbelt Agricultural Expo in Moultrie, Georgia.<br />
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“He informed me that he had recently got into soybean production,” Zanders recalls. “I was looking for something more ...
