If you tell parents in Ghana that their child is using AI at school, they’re likely to be delighted, says Shabnam Aggarwal, chief technology officer of Sierra Leone-based Rising Academies. Unlike American parents who often bristle about AI in elementary grades, across Africa, many see AI as a way to “give their kids a leg up,” she said. Rising Academies created an AI tool called Rori that generates math and other lessons for students on WhatsApp, adapting the difficulty level based on their responses. It writes in natural language and is built to work in areas with low connectivity.

Rori is designed to supplement classroom learning, which has taken a hit from Africa’s severe teacher shortage. “Teachers are trying really hard, but they’re just not getting the support and training they need,” Aggarwal says.

The pitch would be controversial in other parts of the world. Four in ten US adults say they expect AI to have a negative impact on society, according to a February survey from the Pew Research Center, and two of the largest US school districts have recently restricted students’ use of AI.

But students across Africa who used Rori for two 30-minute sessions a week outscored a control group by a margin roughly equivalent to an extra year of study, according to an eight-month study of 500 students conducted in 2023 by Oxford and J-PAL researchers.

Rori is now expanding to government schools in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda, and Ghana. And similar experiments are playing out in other locales, including in Nigeria, where a 2025 study found access to Microsoft Copilot helped students learn English.

— Zoë Schiffer