"To all the women driving positive change in their communities: your determination, creativity, and resilience are the foundation of a more inclusive and sustainable future. At Jokalante, we believe in your power to transform lives." – Ndeye Amy Kebe, CEO & Founder
Jokalante is a Senegal-based AI and data company delivering voice-based agricultural advisory and climate information services to smallholder farmers in local African languages, including Wolof, Pulaar, and Sérère. Its AI voice assistant, Saaytu Mbay, delivers personalized agronomic advisory via WhatsApp in local languages, requiring no literacy, in partnership with Agence Nationale de L’Aviation Civile et de la Météorologie (ANACIM), Senegal's national meteorological agency, whose real-time weather data feeds directly into the system. Through its NAFOORE climate information service, Jokalante also reaches farmers via voice, and SMS. The company led the KALLAAMA project, funded by Lacuna Fund, producing one of the best open multilingual speech corpora in Wolof, Sérère and Pulaar, now used to train and fine-tune its Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) models. Founded in 2016 by Ndèye Amy Kébé, a social entrepreneur and Information and Communication Technology (ICT)-in-agriculture expert, Jokalante has profiled 200,000+ producers across Senegal and the Gambia and reaches 17,000 active farmers minimum per year. The company received the Impact Award at Challenge+ Dakar 2025 from Hautes Études Commerciales (HEC). Through the AI Hub partnership, Jokalante will complete the Pulaar voice pipeline by fine-tuning four Natural Language Processing (NLP) models (ASR, TTS, and bidirectional machine translation), deploy Saaytu Mbay to 300 farmers in a structured field pilot and aimed 2500 farmers, and begin commercial onboarding of institutional partners operating in Wolof and Pulaar-speaking zones.
