In this episode, Rob and I go behind the scenes on something we've been building for a while — and are finally ready to announce. Fortell Impact has been selected to participate in the GAIL program (Gender and AI Livelihoods), funded by the Gates Foundation, in partnership with Shortlist Futures and Inkomoko.

We talk about what this actually means: an AI voice coaching agent, accessible by phone call or SMS, designed to support women entrepreneurs in Kenya — including refugees and migrants — with the kind of personal, proactive coaching that research shows drives real business growth.

We dig into the academic work behind our approach, including Michael Freese's 2017 study in Togo, which found that personal initiative training — teaching behaviour and persistence, not just theory — increased business profits by 30%. We talk about why that matters more than traditional business training, why the impact tends to be even greater for women, and how we're trying to embed that into a conversational AI that can scale from 100 to 5,000 entrepreneurs across multiple countries.

We also draw parallels with Fortell's work in the United States, and ask the big open question: how do you get people to actually use something new, integrate it into their daily lives, and trust it enough to keep coming back?