TraderWise is a voice-first business intelligence tool built for Ghana's informal market traders. Send a WhatsApp voice note in Twi, get a contextual decision-support response in seconds β powered by Claude AI and OpenAI Whisper.
# π TraderWise
> **Voice-First Business Co-Pilot for Ghana's Informal Market Traders.**
TraderWise is a WhatsApp AI business co-pilot for traders in Ghana's informal
markets (Makola, Kejetia, Agbogbloshie). Traders send a voice note in Twi; the
system transcribes, translates, reasons through Claude, and replies on WhatsApp
in seconds β never by deciding for them, but by helping them decide better.
**Built for Ghana. Powered by AI. Grounded in Makola.**
CBC Hackathon β’ University of Ghana β’ Track 3: Economic Empowerment
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## Table of Contents
- Why TraderWise
- How It Works
- Architecture
- Project Structure
- Tech Stack
- Getting Started (Local)
- Environment Variables
- Production Deployment
- Testing
- Design Principles
- Ethics Architecture
- Business Model
- License
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## Why TraderWise
Every morning over 100,000 traders in Ghana's markets wake up to make decisions
that decide whether their families eat that week: how much stock to buy, who to
extend credit to, how to price, how to avoid spoilage. They make these
decisions **alone**, with no tools and no thinking partner.
**TraderWise is the business partner they never had access to β until now.**
In under 8 seconds, a trader sends a WhatsApp voice note in Twi and receives a
contextual, thoughtful response that helps her think through β not decides for
her.
The goal: **reduce weekly spoilage loss for informal traders by 5%.** At 500
traders, that is **GHS 75,000** returned to families that earned it.
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## How It Works
### The Voice Pipeline
```
Trader sends WhatsApp voice note (Twi / Ga)
β WhatsApp Cloud API β FastAPI webhook (signature-verified, BSUID-aware)
β Celery task queue (Redis broker) β worker
β Audio: media ID β /transcribe β Whisper/Groq ASR β text + language
β Text: pass through
β Distress classifier + fraud checker (run BEFORE Claude β no reasoning LLM)
β Load trader profile + last interactions β build system prompt (Ama persona)
β LLM reasoning (pluggable: Claude / Groq / OpenA β¦