📋 Tender Overview
PROJECT ID
110695
TOTAL FUNDING
CAD 1,000,000.00
IDRC OFFICER
Emmy Chirchir
PROJECT STATUS
Active
DURATION
48 months
Summary
Despite the growing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in education, its application in Africa remains constrained by significant challenges, including the lack of high-quality datasets for training AI models, limited adaptation to local languages and ethical concerns such as gender and cultural biases, and regulatory challenges. These challenges disproportionately affect marginalized and underserved groups, limiting their access to quality education. According to UNICEF, Nigeria accounts for 15% of out-of-school children globally, with girls, people living with disabilities and internally displaced people significantly affected. Although AI presents the opportunity to enhance educational inclusivity in these areas — for example, through machine-translation models adaptable to the variations in African languages, dialects and culture —, the critical challenge of insufficient high-quality training datasets persists. This underscores an urgent need for deliberate, research-driven interventions.
This project aims to explore how AI can improve learning accessibility, enhance content delivery and mitigate ethical risks, particularly in the context of local languages and marginalized groups. Through theoretical, applied and collaborative research, training and capacity-building initiatives and strategic partnerships, it will enhance the capacity of African researchers and institutions to advance AI application in education. The project will focus on three thematic areas: developing foundational AI models using two Nigerian languages (Yoruba and Hausa), ensuring more effective language processing and machine translation; designing personalized learning systems for content delivery to improve learning outcomes for those in underserved and marginalized communities; and understanding ethical deployment and governance of AI in education, developing strategies to mitigate ethical challenges associated with AI use in education.
This project is a part of the Artificial Intelligence for Development (AI4D) program, a five-year partnership between IDRC and the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office to support policy, innovations and expanded leadership to spur safe and responsible AI development and use in Africa.
