This is a Zindi Challenge on predicting the financial well-being of small businesses across Southern Africa.
# 🏦 SME Financial Health Index - Zindi Challenge
> Predicting the financial health of small and medium-sized enterprises across Southern Africa using machine learning.
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## 📌 Overview
This repository contains my work for the Zindi SME Financial Health Index Challenge. The goal is to build a machine learning model that predicts a **Financial Health Index (FHI)** for SMEs — classifying businesses as having **Low**, **Medium**, or **High** financial health.
The FHI is a composite measure built across four key dimensions:
- Savings and assets
- Debt and repayment ability
- Resilience to shocks
- Access to credit and financial services
The dataset covers SMEs from four Southern African countries: **Eswatini, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, and Malawi**, and includes socio-economic and business features such as traded commodities, export/import activity, firm size, demographics, and location.
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## 🗂️ Repository Structure
```
├── data/
│ ├── raw/ # Original competition data (not tracked in git)
│ └── processed/ # Cleaned and feature-engineered datasets (to be added)
├── notebooks/
│ ├── Starter Notebook.ipynb # Notebook provided by Zindi
│ ├── Financial health dataipynb # Contains the complete project i.e., EDA, Processing and Modelling.
│ └── 03_modelling.ipynb
├── src/
│ ├── features.py # Feature engineering logic
│ ├── train.py # Model training scripts
│ └── predict.py # Inference scripts
├── models/ # Saved model artifacts
└── README.md
```
> ⚠️ **Note:** This structure is a work in progress and will evolve as the project develops.
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## 🚀 Approach
*This section will be updated as the project progresses.*
**Current status:** 🟡 In progress
Planned steps:
- [ ] Exploratory data analysis (EDA)
- [ ] Data cleaning and preprocessing
- [ ] Feature engineering
- [ ] Baseline model
- [ ] Model tuning and ensembling
- [ ] Final submission
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## 📊 …