In the global rush to embrace artificial intelligence 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, African young 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.
A comprehensive study commissioned by the Global Campaign for Education (GCE), led by myself, drawing on nearly 194 youth in different focus group discussions, dozens of youth organisations, and teacher surveys across more than 27 African countries, reveals a striking consensus: AI is welcomed as a “thinking partner” and “24/7 personal tutor” that could finally deliver personalised learning to millions trapped in under-resourced systems.
More than 70% of surveyed teachers are already using generative tools for lesson planning and content creation, not as replacements but as assistants that free them to mentor rather than merely lecture.
Yet this optimism 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 — AI will not democratise education. It will entrench a new apartheid: premium features for the urban elite, crumbs for everyone else.
Blunt and unapologetic
Their point is blunt and unapologetic: “Don’t decide for us, decide with us.” In an era when Silicon Valley dominates AI development, this demand for co-governance challenges the very architecture of technological progress.
Sceptics in wealthier nations might dismiss these concerns as predictable resistance from the global periphery, or argue that market forces and rapid innovation will eventually trickle down benefits to all. After all, why delay the rollout of powerful tutoring systems when children are already falling behind?
The counterargument from Africa’s classrooms is not Luddite fear but hard-earned pragmatism. More than 85% of respondents cite the digital divide — not abstract inequality, but the daily reality of no electricity or internet — as the primary barrier. In South Sudan, where electricity reaches barely 5% of the population, or Burundi with its 11% internet penetration, the notion that ChatGPT alone can “level the playing field” rings hollow.
Without solar-powered offline hubs, zero-rated educational data, and devices treated as basic infrastructure akin to textbooks or desks, AI remains a luxury gadget, accelerating advantage for those who already have it.
This is not mere complaint; it is a diagnosis of a deeper flaw in how the world deploys technology. Current models are overwhelmingly English-centric, trained on Western datasets that misalign with local histories, proverbs, or curricula. Youth in the study describe them as “Westernised and colonialised”, a phrase that should give pause to anyone who believes AI is culturally neutral.
When a Nigerian teacher generates a quiz only to find it riddled with irrelevant or biased examples, or when a Swahili-speaking student in Tanzania receives responses that mangle context, the technology does not empower — it alienates. Add paywalls that lock advanced capabilities behind subscriptions, and you recreate the “pay-to-win” dynamic that already plagues global education.
The result? A reinforced two-tier system where privileged students gain superhuman tutoring while rural or displaced children watch from afar.
Perhaps the thorniest objection comes from those who fear that over-reliance on AI will erode critical thinking everywhere, not just in Africa. Here, the continent’s respondents are ahead of the curve: 91% of youth organisations rank the hollowing out of creativity and problem-solving as the most urgent ethical risk.
They do not propose bans — an approach they rightly call futile — but “embrace, don’t ban” with safeguards. Their prescription: mandatory critical AI literacy that teaches students to interrogate outputs, detect biases, and verify provenance, not just prompt effectively. This is not anti-technology; it is a defence of education’s core purpose — to forge independent minds capable of citizenship and innovation.
Uniquely compelling
What makes these voices uniquely compelling is their vantage point from the margins. Africa’s youth bulge, with 70% of the population under 30, represents the largest cohort of young learners the world has ever seen. If AI fails them, it fails humanity’s future workforce on a planetary scale. Yet their demands are remarkably practical and rights-based: public investment in multilingual, locally built AI; data sovereignty to prevent surveillance; sustained teacher training rather than one-off workshops.
These are not radical utopias but prerequisites for any technology claiming to serve the public good.
To those who insist private innovation will solve everything faster than cumbersome public processes, consider the mistrust baked into the system: half of youth organisations already view their involvement in AI policy as tokenistic. Without human-rights-based regulation and public leadership, AI risks becoming digital colonialism 2.0, where African children train the algorithms that later price them out of jobs.
As 2025 unfolds, with initiatives like Rwanda’s ethics-focused curricula, South Africa’s push for coding and robotics in schools, and continental calls for AI competency frameworks, the window for getting this right is narrowing. Projects training hundreds of thousands in AI skills across the continent show what is possible when leadership is African-led. But scale requires listening — not charity, not imposition.
The stakes transcend Africa. The way we integrate AI into education here will preview its global trajectory: equaliser or exacerbator? If policymakers in Washington andBrussels truly want technology that serves humanity’s majority, they should start by amplifying the demand echoing from Lagos to Lusaka: Build AI for the excluded, or do not build it at all.
The students who have the most to lose are offering the clearest blueprint for winning. Ignoring them would be the real act of intellectual laziness. DM