East Africa · Agriculture Live · Deployed

AgroFutures

Agricultural advisory and regional pest & disease early-warning for smallholder farmers in Kenya — delivered over any phone, in the farmer's own language.

Where It Runs
Any phone the farmer already owns.

2G USSD for feature phones. Voice IVR with local-language text-to-speech for callers who'd rather listen than read. And — as of today — Telegram and WhatsApp for the growing number of farmers on a smartphone.

One advisory engine, met on whatever channel the farmer already uses. No app to install, no data plan required for the USSD and voice paths.

USSD · Voice IVR · Telegram · WhatsApp
2G covers 98% of Kenya's population — wider than 4G.

Because the advisory runs on the 2G layer, it reaches any phone anywhere there's a signal, with no smartphone and no data plan needed. That coverage figure is the addressable footprint — not a registered-user count. (Coverage: Safaricom.)

Registered farmers to date: [[REAL_REGISTRATION_COUNT]] ← replace with the real system registration figure; do not use a county population number.

98% 2G population coverage · Kenya
Featured · Live behaviour

It reasons against the farm — and hedges when the photo doesn't fit.

On Telegram and WhatsApp, a farmer can send a photo of a sick plant. Most tools would return a raw image-classifier score and stop there. AgroFutures doesn't.

It checks the photo against what it already knows about that farm — growth stage, vapour-pressure deficit, recent weather, soil. When the classifier's read doesn't fit those conditions, it visibly revises or hedges its own answer and asks for more evidence, rather than forcing a false diagnosis in either direction.

That's the reasoning discipline the whole platform is built on: confirm, discard, or flag — never silently trust a score, never silently reject an out-of-pattern signal. It's a real, demonstrable behaviour, shown in the recording, not a claim.

Screen recording Photo-diagnosis flow

Telegram / WhatsApp photo diagnosis — recording to be embedded.

The Advisory Pipeline

From scattered reports to a warning a farmer can act on.

Text reports from many farmers cluster into an outbreak signal before any single farmer could see the pattern.

Where a photo exists, it confirms or reframes the signal using farm-specific context — growth stage, soil, weather — rather than trusting a raw classifier score.

Confirmed evidence generates input resourcing and preventive warnings — including for farms that never submitted a photo themselves.

Alerts go back to farmers over the channel they already use — USSD, a voice callback in their language, or a message thread.

Language Is an Access Problem

Seven thousand languages are spoken on earth; the major AI platforms were trained on a fraction. We use Khaya AI (GhanaNLP) for African-language TTS and are integrating PazaBench ASR models from Microsoft Research Africa for voice input in Dholuo, Kalenjin, Kikuyu, Maasai, and Somali. Language is not a localisation problem. It is an access problem.

Why it matters A farmer who receives a mistranslated pest advisory doesn't just miss the information — they may act on the wrong one. Generic translation APIs have, in our testing, misidentified regional languages and mistranslated local crop-variety names into nonsense.
Verification note Specific named-vendor examples are re-verified before publication, since low-resource-language model quality shifts month to month.
AgroFutures

The intelligence is frontier. The phone is $15.