Four languages, one WhatsApp number, nothing to install

RegenZ works with small scale farmers across South Africa. Their core service is testing: soil, water and leaf samples, which their systems read to make soil health recommendations from. Those farmers speak four different languages. Very few of them are going to install an app.

An app asks for a lot. Storage on the phone. An app store account. Data to download it, then data again to update it. Reading whichever single language it was built in. And a reason to open it again next week. Signing a farmer up once was never the hard part. Staying useful across a whole growing season is.

RegenZ also answers to funders for what happens in the field, so proof has to come back from the farmer rather than be assumed. All of it was running on Twilio, stitched together with a couple of other tools.

The service was rebuilt on Paige, on one WhatsApp Business number. The first thing a farmer sees is a language menu: English, isiZulu, isiXhosa or Afrikaans.

That choice drives everything after it. Nothing is written in one language and translated around the edges. Every menu, every reply and every reminder is stored per language, so adding a fifth one is a data change rather than a rebuild. RegenZ is having the isiZulu and isiXhosa wording checked by native speakers.

A farmer registers themselves, then their fields, one at a time. From there they can order a soil, water or leaf test, start or upload a fertiliser programme, ask a farming question, edit their own details, or ask for a person. Ordering a test runs start to finish in the thread, and the collection PIN comes back in the same chat once the RegenZ team has it. Those samples are what the soil health recommendations are built from, so the ordering path is the one that matters most.

The assistant answers general farming questions in whatever language the farmer writes in. It will not give pesticide advice, promise a yield, or compare competitor products. Those go to a human agronomist, and so does anything else the moment the farmer asks for one. The bot goes quiet, a RegenZ team member picks the conversation up on the same number from their phone, and a Slack message tells them it is waiting.

Opting out is split in two: stop the scheduled messages, or delete the data. Stopping the messages does not switch the bot off, so a farmer who wants quiet keeps the parts they asked for.

The bot is live on RegenZ’s own number. Farmers register, add their fields, order tests and ask questions in the language they picked.

The programme engine behind it is built and scheduled, and has not sent anything yet. A fertiliser programme attached to a field becomes a week by week schedule of reminders, anchored to the start of the week so a message is never late. Change the planting date and every future reminder is rebuilt, while anything already sent stays as it is.

The weekly reminder and the end-of-week check-in are set up and waiting on their first run. When they start, the answer comes back as a photo in the thread the farmer is already reading. No upload screen, no file picker.

The rebuild took RegenZ off Twilio and retired two other tools with it. What they run now is one number, four languages and one system behind it.