A recent UNESCO Courier piece by researcher James Maisiri puts into sharp focus a problem that should concern everyone invested in the future of African kAnowledge and education: the AI tools flooding the continent’s classrooms were not built with African realities in mind. The majority of educational AI systems operate in English, and studies show that in Nigeria, ChatGPT only recognizes 20 per cent of written Hausa sentences, even though more than 80 million people in the country speak the language. This is not a minor technical glitch, rather it is a structural exclusion that forces millions of students to abandon their mother tongues in order to access tools that were supposedly designed to help them.

The consequences go well beyond inconvenience. Language encodes the culture and worldview of its speakers, and when AI-powered technologies marginalize local languages, they weaken the cultural frameworks through which students interpret knowledge. Maisiri illustrates this with a striking example: when researchers asked ChatGPT and Google Gemini how many seasons there are, these systems replied four, but in West Africa, there are primarily two seasons: wet and dry. These are symptoms of AI systems trained entirely on Western data, producing homogenized content that quietly displaces African ways of knowing.

The article does not stop at diagnosis. Developers in Ghana have built GhanaGPT, a customized AI designed to support localized curricula in English and local languages such as Twi, while language specialists from the “African Next Voices” project have digitized 9,000 hours of spoken languages from Kenya, South Africa, and Nigeria to create datasets that anyone can use to train AI models on local languages. There is also the case of Rori, an AI-powered maths tutor operating through WhatsApp in Sierra Leone and Ghana, where a study of over 1,000 students found that academic results tended to improve after six months of use, with especially pronounced gains for students who had been struggling.

The throughline of Maisiri’s argument is urgent and worth sitting with: if Africa does not shape AI, AI will shape Africa. The full piece is a compelling and carefully reported read for anyone thinking about the future of African education, technology, and cultural sovereignty. Read it in full here.