Using advanced machine learning and World Bank Enterprise Survey data to identify financial distress signals across East African SMEs
Classify SMEs into Stable, Moderate Risk, or High Risk categories using 32 leakage-free features β finance access, productivity, obstacle burden, and firm maturity
Understand exactly which factors drive distress predictions with firm-level explanations
Single model trained on 8 countries validates genuine cross-country performance β ROC-AUC 0.86+ achieved across all 8 nations with no country-specific retraining