The hard truth about AI and inequality in Africa's schools

A continent-wide study delivers a blunt message to the world's artificial intelligence architects: without real provision for the excluded, the technology risks becoming digital colonialism 2.0

- By Sachi Satapathy

More than 70% of surveyed teachers are already using generative tools for lesson planning and content creation. They use these tools as assistants that free them to mentor rather than merely lecture.

Yet this is fiercely conditional. African educators and students insist that without deliberate design for the excluded - those without reliable electricity, affordable data or tools in their mother tongues - artificial intelligence (AI) will not democratise education. It will entrench a new apartheid: premium features for the urban elite, crumbs for everyone else.

In the global rush to embrace AI as education's great saviour, one continent's students and teachers are offering a sobering corrective.

From the dust-swept schools of rural Malawi to the overcrowded classrooms of Lagos, young African people are not rejecting AI - they are embracing it with a fervour that might surprise Western sceptics, who see the technology only through the lens of cheating scandals or job-killing automation.

I led a comprehensive study that was commissioned by the Global Campaign for Education. It drew on 194 youth in different focus group discussions, dozens of youth organisations and teacher surveys in more than 27 African countries. It revealed a striking consensus: AI is welcomed as a "thinking partner" and a "24/7 personal tutor" that could finally deliver personalised learning to millions who are trapped in underresourced systems.

Blunt and unapologetic