AgriVoice is seeking one cocoa-sector partner to recruit a two-week cohort of 20–50 Asante-Twi-speaking farmers and appoint the extension officer who will receive questions the system cannot safely answer. The partner’s role is practical: bring in the right farmers, make the escalation route real, and help judge whether the service earns a place in cocoa extension work.
At 4:40 one afternoon, an illustrative farmer we will call Kwaku is standing at the edge of his cocoa plot with a voice note open on his phone. Rain has darkened the path behind him. He has noticed an unfamiliar mark on several pods and wants to know whether he should spray before the next rain.
The danger is not that Kwaku has no answer at all. The danger is receiving one that sounds certain when the information is incomplete, the product name is unclear, or the question needs a trained person to assess it. A wrong pesticide instruction could put his crop, his health, or the people returning to the farm at risk. If nobody owns the next step, his question can sit unanswered while the decision still has to be made.
That is why this pilot depends on an accountable institution, not a phone number alone.
A pilot needs a real route from farmer to extension officer
AgriVoice is being prepared as a voice workflow for cocoa farmers who speak Asante Twi. A farmer sends or records a question. The service is designed to select from reviewed guidance, return the response by voice, and escalate uncertain or missing cases to a human.
The human part has to be named before the first farmer joins.
For questions with clear, approved guidance, the aim is a useful response in Twi. For pesticide questions without verified dosage, re-entry, or pre-harvest information, AgriVoice must withhold instruction and escalate. That restraint is central to the pilot. Pesticide Re-entry Guidance: Why AgriVoice Refuses to Guess and Escalates explains why a confident guess is the wrong kind of answer.
A partner who names an extension officer gives Kwaku’s unanswered voice note somewhere specific to go. The officer receives the escalation, can request clarification where needed, and can respond through an agreed process. The pilot will measure whether that queue is handled with a median response time below one working day.
Recruitment should produce evidence, not a tidy attendance list
The pilot cohort is deliberately small: 20–50 farmers over two weeks. The purpose is to learn whether the workflow works under real conditions, not to declare a public launch.
A cocoa-sector partner can recruit farmers who actually fit the test: Asante-Twi speakers with cocoa questions that arise in ordinary farm work. The group should include people likely to send short voice notes, describe a problem in their own words, switch between Twi and English terms where that is natural, or ask questions that cannot be answered safely from the reviewed content.
Those moments are more useful than polished demonstrations.
AgriVoice needs to measure successful answers and correct escalations, comprehension, repeat use in the second week, response time, and the cost of completing a question. It also needs to collect consented farmer questions for speech-recognition measurement and test deletion behavior. A partner helps make those checks possible without treating farmers as a source of anonymous product data.
The pilot has clear safety boundaries. No unsafe pesticide answer should reach a farmer. Repeated confident wrong answers are a stop or redesign signal. If farmers cannot understand the voice response, that is evidence to act on, even if every internal test looked clean.
The partner brings the field reality the product cannot invent
Kwaku’s question may begin with a phrase that sounds ordinary in a village and ambiguous in a content pack. A pesticide name may be partly obscured by roadside traffic. A farmer may ask for a recommendation when what they need first is a visit, a photograph, or a conversation with an officer who knows what is happening locally.
A reviewed voice service can create a safer first response. It cannot replace local extension judgment.
This is especially important as Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire pursue coordinated cocoa-sector action. Coordination at sector level still has to reach the moment a farmer is deciding what to do in one plot. A workable route from a Twi voice note to a responsible extension officer is one small, testable part of that path.
For the institution, the pilot is a chance to see the actual escalation load before making wider commitments. How many questions are answered from approved guidance? Which topics repeatedly need a person? Are farmers comfortable speaking to the service? Does the officer receive enough context to act? Those are operational questions, and a two-week cohort can surface them honestly.
What a ready partner would commit to
The right partner does not need to promise scale. It needs to make the pilot accountable.
It would recruit the 20–50 farmer cohort, identify the extension officer responsible for escalations, and agree how that officer receives and responds to them. It would help ensure farmers understand what AgriVoice can answer, what it will escalate, and how consent and deletion requests work.
Before farmer exposure, AgriVoice also requires reviewed spoken Asante Twi content, agronomist clearance for held chemical guidance, a working WhatsApp path, farmer-speech evaluation, and a staff safety rehearsal. The pilot starts only when those gates are met.
Back at his plot, Kwaku should not have to decide whether silence means nobody saw his question. If AgriVoice cannot safely answer, the system should say so plainly and send the question to the person whose job it is to help. The next useful detail is simple: a named officer, an agreed queue, and a farmer who knows where his voice note went.
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