Amana turns the savings and lending activity of Nigerian cooperative societies into verifiable credit, giving members who have saved and repaid faithfully for years, yet remain invisible to banks, a credit identity the formal system can finally recognise.
# Amana
### Turn trust into credit.
> Turning faithful cooperative savers into verifiable, bankable borrowers — so the people the financial system can't see finally get seen.
Built for the **APIConf Lagos 2026 Hackathon** · Powered by the **Monnify API**
**Live demo:**
amana1.vercel.app **Demo video:** _Record against §2 happy path_ · **Repo:** `
github.com`
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## 1. The Problem
Cooperative societies and thrift groups are how millions of Nigerians actually save and borrow. But inside them, **lending is done blind.**
A cooperative pools members' savings and lends it back out — usually up to a multiple of what you've saved, decided by the treasurer's memory and gut. There's no scoring, no ledger a member can see, and no way to tell a faithful saver apart from a risky one except by who the executives happen to trust. Records live in a notebook or a spreadsheet. Disputes follow. Default follows.
And beneath that sits the deeper problem: **a member can save and repay reliably for a decade, and none of it is visible to the formal financial system.** A market trader who takes cash, pays cash, and saves in a contribution group generates no signal any bank or credit bureau can read — even though that person may be entirely creditworthy. Their reliability is trapped in a notebook. In Nigeria, roughly a quarter of adults remain financially excluded, and a large share of the rest rely on exactly these informal arrangements that leave no data trail.
## 2. Who We're Solving It For
- **Cooperative societies** (our customer) — and the executives who run them: the chairman, secretary, and treasurer who make lending decisions today with no tools.
- **Members** (our users) — informal traders, artisans, and low-income earners: the credit-invisible.
- **Banks & microfinance banks** (our future demand side) — institutions that *want* to lend to this population but have no way to assess them.
## 3. Why It Matters
Across Africa, mill …