Expert Asks African Leaders To Transform Education With AI

A professor of Cybersecurity, Prof. Ibrahim Adeyanju, has called on African leaders to revolutionise education with Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Adeyanju made the call at the maiden public lecture of the African School of Economics (The Pan-African University of Excellence) on “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Higher Education in Africa,” held in Abuja.

He emphasised the importance of education in advancing sustainable development and achieving socio-economic growth.

Adeyanju is also the chief executive officer of Galaxy Backbone Ltd, regretted that despite the progress that Africa has made in recent years, it is still constrained by backwardness in education which has limited its capacity to compete with some other regions of the world.

He identified low teacher effectiveness and high out-of-school as some of the problems thwarting the educational development of Africans.

Adeyanju recommended the integration of AI to address the challenges facing education in Africa.

“AI can revolutionise African education through language learning, chatbots and virtual classrooms. It can also provide tailored learning experiences and improve access to quality education in remote areas,” he said.

Adeyanju also recommended forging culturally grounded and ethical frameworks, empowering educators through comprehensive training, bridging digital divides with strategic initiatives, fostering indigenous AI solutions and addressing infrastructural deficits among others as part of the way forward for Africans to cope with the challenges of the future.

Earlier, in his address tagged: “The Past is Present, The Future is Now”, the vice chancellor of African School of Economics (The Pan-African University of Excellence), Prof. Mahfouz Adedimeji, decried the tendency of many people these days to outsource their natural intelligence to Artificial Intelligence.

Adedimeji, a former vice chancellor of Ahman Pategi University in Kwara State, suggested the need for ethical frameworks in AI utilisation.

He sounded a note of caution while likening AI to water and fire that are indispensable and useful “as long as we are in control of them, but dangerous when out of control of human beings that they serve.”

He described the African School of Economics as a conventional university offering a wide variety of academic programmes including cybersecurity.