Furaha, a Ugandan platform that helps parents borrow to pay school fees, says it has now kept 100,000 children in school, 2 years after launch. It wants to reach 10 million across Africa by 2030.
The company announced the milestone on 5 October 2026. It does not lend its own money: Furaha runs onboarding, identity checks, credit scoring, disbursement and collections for its partner banks, Diamond Trust Bank Uganda, Cairo Bank Uganda, Opportunity Bank and FINCA Uganda, which fund the short-term loans.
Scoring parents banks cannot see
Furaha’s case is that many parents can repay but have no credit history, collateral or payslip for a bank to assess, and that school-fee deadlines rarely line up with when families are paid. It scores them using alternative data, including mobile money and school-fee payment records, drawing on partners such as MTN, Airtel, and the school-payment platforms SchoolPay, SurePay, and PegPay.
“Millions of parents have never been seen by traditional credit systems, not necessarily because they can’t repay, but because the data needed to assess them has not existed in one place,” said Yustus Aribariho, a co-founder of Furaha.
That is the same gap African banks themselves rank high among uses for AI: a survey of the sector in July found credit scoring for thin-file customers second only to fraud detection. Furaha was incubated by SC Ventures.
What it did not disclose
Furaha did not say how much it has lent, what interest rates parents pay, or how many loans are repaid on time. It describes itself as the first lending fintech in Africa to channel commercial-bank financing towards education, a claim tech.africa could not independently verify.
The company is also careful about its own reach. It cites UNESCO’s estimate that sub-Saharan Africa accounts for nearly 40% of the world’s out-of-school children, and says financing “addresses one barrier to school attendance; it is not a solution to every cause of exclusion”.
“The 100,000-child milestone is an important proof point, but it is not the destination,” said chief executive Dennis Musinguzi.
Other investors are backing finance built into everyday software: in July, Renew Capital picked 15 embedded-finance startups that put financial products into the tools small businesses already use.
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