Listening at scale: Advancing women’s participation in agricultural advisory through AI speech technologies
AI can amplify women’s voices in agricultural advisory services. Voice-based tools built on radio and mobile call-in platforms help overcome barriers related to literacy and smart phone ownership
- women
- Artificial Intelligence
- extension
By Nelson Mganga, Gertrude Nalubinga, and Eliot Jones-GarciaNovember 4, 2026
Key takeaways
- AI can amplify women’s voices in agricultural advisory services. Voice-based tools built on radio and mobile call-in platforms help overcome barriers related to literacy and smart phone ownership.
- ·Local data makes AI tools more accurate and useful. Training speech recognition models with real farmer calls can overcome limitations of models trained on clean, scripted speech.
- Gender-responsive design is essential from the start. AI systems must intentionally include women’s voices, protect privacy, and ensure that women’s questions and concerns shape advisory content, research, and programming decisions.
Artificial intelligence is increasingly used to create tools for inclusive agricultural advisory. Across the sector, these applications are being developed to augment research processes and expand last-mile delivery of information, advice, and other forms of support. The promise is clear: faster advice, lower delivery costs, and services that can reach farmers underserved by conventional extension systems. However, this promise often overlooks something essential.
Agricultural advice has never traveled through technology alone. It circulates through trusted networks and local institutions that farmers have relied on for generations. For many rural farmers—and especially for women—this means that access to digital tools is shaped by literacy, phone ownership, language, and entrenched socio-cultural norms.
An AI advisory tool may be technically impressive, but if it is disconnected from these realities, it risks reinforcing the same exclusions it claims to solve. This is why voice matters, and why radio and mobile call-in platforms are more important than ever. Voice‑based systems reduce literacy barriers, allow women to participate from home, and build on well-established communication channels.
In this post, we outline the institutional arrangements and technical capacities that must come together for women farmers to meaningfully participate in AI advisory services and why intentional, gender‑responsive design is essential.