Rwanda’s Ministry of ICT and Innovation has unveiled an AI voice assistant for farmers that already answers roughly 60% of questions correctly during live testing. Minister Paula Ingabire presented the tool, named Tunga, at the Africa Food Systems Forum in Kigali, held from 1 to 4 September 2026. The Kinyarwanda-language assistant is being tested through the Ministry of Agriculture’s call centre, where farmers can already reach it.
Rwanda plans to use the AI voice assistant to close a wide gap in farm advisory services. Agricultural extension coverage currently reaches about 35% of the country’s farmers, according to KT Press, which reported the announcement on 3 September 2026. The government wants to lift that figure to 69% and reach 2.5 million farmers by 2029, using Tunga as a central piece of that expansion.
How the assistant works
Farmers call in and ask questions in Kinyarwanda, their everyday language, rather than navigating a written app or web portal. Tunga interprets the question and delivers an answer on pests, planting windows, or fertiliser use, working alongside the human agents already staffing the call centre. At roughly 60% accuracy, the tool still needs human backup for a meaningful share of calls, but that figure is expected to improve as the ministry gathers more real farmer queries to refine it.
The assistant builds on infrastructure Rwanda has already built. It sits alongside e-Soko, a government platform for market pricing information, and Smart Nkunganire, an input-subsidy programme that already counts 1.5 million registered farmers. Layering an AI voice tool onto that existing user base gives Tunga a head start most new agricultural technology projects lack.
WebRwanda, reporting independently on the same announcement on 3 September 2026, cited a specific gain from a related feature: AI-tailored fertiliser recommendations have produced a 20% yield increase for farmers who used them. That figure suggests the payoff from combining voice access with data-driven advice, rather than voice access alone, may be doing much of the work in lifting output.
For a smallholder farmer working a small plot with thin margins, a 20% yield gain from better-targeted fertiliser use represents a meaningful change in household income, not a marginal efficiency improvement. That is the kind of concrete result Rwanda’s government appears to be counting on to justify the wider rollout it now plans through 2029.
Part of a wider extension push
Rwanda’s approach reflects a broader shift across African agriculture, where extension services have long struggled to reach smallholder farmers in remote areas. Human extension officers are costly to train and deploy at scale, and Rwanda’s 35% coverage rate before Tunga shows how far most systems fall short of universal reach. Voice-based AI tools offer a way to extend the reach of a limited number of trained officers, at least for routine questions.
The 2.5-million-farmer target by 2029 would represent a significant expansion from today’s user base. Reaching that scale will depend on accuracy improving well beyond the current 60% and on farmers trusting an automated voice over a familiar human contact. Rwanda’s government appears to be betting that the two problems, wider reach and consistent quality, can be solved together rather than in sequence.
Raising extension coverage from 35% to 69% would nearly double the share of Rwandan farmers who can reach reliable agricultural advice. That gap has persisted despite years of investment in human extension officers, which is why an AI voice assistant has become central to the ministry’s plan rather than a peripheral experiment.
The project also sits within a wider Global South pattern of governments and companies experimenting with digital tools for smallholder agriculture, a pattern echoed in a newly opened agri-tech testing hub in the United Arab Emirates. Whether Tunga becomes a model for other African ministries will likely depend on how quickly its accuracy climbs, and whether the fertiliser-recommendation gains WebRwanda reported hold up as more farmers begin using the system.
