South Africa

I’m currently based in South Africa – these posts are about the work I am have done here.

What AI means for Mzansi’s classrooms

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Niall McNulty speaking on the Lefa AI webinar, What AI Means for Mzansi's Classrooms, September 2026

On 10 September 2026 I joined the first of three national webinars in Human Studios’ Lefa AI series, What AI Means for Mzansi’s Classrooms. The session was Navigating AI, Learning and Safety in South African Basic Education. Lefa is a ten-month national initiative convened by Human Studios, with UNICEF South Africa and the DG Murray Trust. It is a sense-making process, not an adoption campaign: research, dialogue and practical conversation while South African schools are already using AI, and while national guidelines are still being written.

I was a panellist on the AI and learning conversation. Shirley Eadie facilitated. My contribution was practical examples, with a limit I wanted on the table early: AI does not improve learning because it provides answers. It helps when it is designed to preserve productive struggle, work within a learner’s zone of proximal development, and leave teachers in charge of judgement. One public example was Cambridge’s Future Educator programme with KFAS in Kuwait, where STEM teachers applied AI through their own subjects rather than sitting through a tour of tools. That programme has no published learning-outcome data, so I offered it as a design story, not as proof of attainment.

What Lefa is trying to do

Lefa AI describes itself as a national process to help South Africa make sense of what AI means for basic education, from Grade R to Grade 12, and to shape a response that is informed, collaborative and grounded in local context. Over ten months it brings together schools, communities, researchers, policymakers and organisations through rapid research, dialogue, webinars, roundtables and accessible resources. The premise on the Lefa AI site is simple: AI is moving faster than schools, systems and policy can adapt, and South Africa’s existing challenges of inequality, language diversity, teacher workload and uneven access to resources make delay expensive.

I like that framing because it does not start from a product. Most AI conversations in education begin with a tool and work backwards to a use. Lefa starts with what schools are already experiencing and asks what responsible use would look like here.

The argument I made on the panel

The point I wanted on the table early was that answers are not the same as learning. A tool that gives a learner the answer can remove exactly the effort that produces understanding. AI helps when it is designed to keep productive struggle in the task, to pitch support at the edge of what a learner can do with help, and to leave the teacher in charge of judgement about what counts as good work.

That has practical consequences for anyone designing or buying AI for schools:

  • Ask what the learner still has to do. If the tool does the thinking, it is a shortcut, not a tutor.
  • Ask where the teacher sees the work. Support that happens privately between a learner and a chatbot is hard to assess and easy to misuse.
  • Ask what evidence exists. A good design story is useful, but it is not proof that learning improved.

The Kuwait example I used is a case in point. Teachers on the Future Educator programme applied AI inside their own subjects, which is the right design choice, but there is no published learning-outcome data yet, so I described it as a design story and nothing more.

Why the questions here are local

Language is the clearest example. South Africa has eleven official languages, and most AI models are trained mainly on English text produced elsewhere. A tool that works well for an English-medium school in a well-resourced suburb may be far less useful for a learner whose home language is isiXhosa or Sepedi. The same is true of infrastructure: a system that assumes constant broadband and a device per learner describes only part of a bimodal school system.

Teacher capacity matters just as much. Teachers are already stretched, and AI training that adds workload without removing any will not last. The most useful uses are the ones that save teachers time on preparation and assessment while keeping their professional judgement visible.

What to watch next

This was the first of three webinars in the series, and Lefa also runs roundtables and publishes research and resources as it goes. If you are working on AI in South African schools, the series is a good place to test your assumptions against what teachers, researchers and officials are actually seeing. For a practical starting point at school level, the Ghana readiness findings show the same pattern I expect here: tools arriving faster than the policies and people needed to use them well.

Lefa is worth paying attention to because the South African questions are local: eleven official languages, a bimodal school system, teacher capacity that is already uneven, and tools trained somewhere else. If you work in a school, a ministry or an education organisation here, start with the Lefa AI site.

Related resources

Related reading

Vibe Coding: How South Africans Can Build Software by Simply Describing What They Want

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An approach to programming that could enhance digital skills development across the country

I’m a big fan of Cursor for coding with AI, and this movement now has a name – “vibe coding” – which allows people to create programmes by describing what they want in natural language and letting AI handle much of the actual coding. As South Africa grapples with developing digital skills and implementing new coding curricula in schools, vibe coding represents a potentially transformative approach that could democratise software development across the country.

The timing couldn’t be better. With the Department of Basic Education rolling out coding and robotics as part of the new curriculum framework, and the country’s ongoing push to develop digital literacy, vibe coding offers a bridge between traditional programming education and practical software creation. Rather than spending months learning syntax and programming languages, South Africans can now focus on problem-solving and creative thinking while AI handles the technical heavy lifting.

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Adapting the AI Assessment Scale for South African Schools

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Part of: Assessment in the AI Era: Adapting the AI Assessment Scale for African Classrooms, a practical guide to AI-era assessment for schools and assessment teams.

Balancing innovation with accessibility in education across the Global South

The arrival of generative AI tools like ChatGPT has sent ripples through educational systems worldwide, leaving many educators caught between embracing innovation and preserving academic integrity. While much of the global North grapples with preventing AI “cheating,” schools in South Africa and the broader Global South face a more nuanced challenge: integrating these powerful tools meaningfully within contexts of varying digital access and infrastructure.

The AI Assessment Scale Framework

The AI Assessment Scale (AIAS), developed by educators Mike Perkins, Jasper Roe, Jason MacVaugh and Leon Furze, offers a promising approach that might be particularly valuable for South African schools. Rather than taking a binary view of AI use as either permitted or prohibited, the AIAS provides a five-level framework that allows educators to clearly articulate how and when AI tools can be appropriately integrated into learning.

This scale moves beyond the simplistic “cheating” narrative that has dominated discussions since ChatGPT’s release in November 2022 (and in fact, is still raised in meetings with school leaders). Instead, it acknowledges that we, as educators, define what constitutes academic misconduct and must clearly communicate these boundaries to our students.

The Five Levels Explained

The AIAS consists of five distinct levels of AI integration:

Level 1: No AI

At this level, students complete assessments entirely without generative AI. This approach works well for supervised activities, handwritten tasks or examinations where personal knowledge and skills must be demonstrated. In the South African context, this level creates equity by removing potential advantages for students with greater digital access, particularly relevant in areas with limited connectivity.

Level 2: AI-Assisted Idea Generation and Structuring

Here, students can use AI to brainstorm and structure ideas, but they must produce the final work themselves. This level is particularly useful for idea development and might help South African students working in additional languages rather than their mother tongue. They might use AI to help generate initial ideas but must develop and express these themselves.

Level 3: AI-Assisted Editing

Students create original work at this level but can use AI for refinement and editing. This proves especially valuable for language improvements and could support South African learners working across multiple languages. Students would submit both their original drafts and AI-assisted final versions to demonstrate the editing process.

Level 4: AI Task Completion, Human Evaluation

Students actively use AI for specific components of tasks while critically evaluating AI outputs. This level encourages an understanding AI’s capabilities and limitations and could help prepare South African students for a workforce increasingly shaped by these technologies.

Level 5: Full AI

AI is used throughout the task at the discretion of students or teachers. This approach suits situations where AI forms an integral part of learning outcomes. In well-resourced South African schools with reliable internet access, this might include innovative projects exploring AI as a collaborative tool.

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How South African Business Can Leverage High-Level AI Capabilities

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South African businesses can use current AI tools for analysis, drafting, coding assistance and routine process work. The constraint is rarely access to a chatbot. It is data quality, skills, connectivity and a clear job for the tool.

Last reviewed: 31 August 2026. This page does not quote global adoption percentages. Those figures move quickly and need a named source.

What follows is a practical map for managers, owners and consultants: where these tools tend to help, where South African conditions matter, and how to start without a large data-science team.

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How Artificial Intelligence Can Transform Education in South Africa

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The short version

AI is already in use in some South African classrooms, ministries and companies. The constraint is not a shortage of tools. It is uneven electricity and connectivity, teacher preparation, language, and the lack of clear school-level rules. Teachers and learners are already using general chat tools for planning, explanation and homework, often on phones, which puts practice ahead of most written school policies.

If you lead a school, four things come first:

  • Say what is allowed in this school, for teachers and for learners.
  • Train staff to check outputs, not only to log in.
  • Design tasks that still have value if a model can draft the first version.
  • Do not assume a tool that needs always-on broadband will work everywhere.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a significant force in education worldwide. In South Africa;a nation characterised by deep historical inequities and a pronounced digital divide;the potential for AI to reshape teaching and learning is particularly compelling. Facing challenges such as overcrowded classrooms, a shortage of well-trained educators and a mismatch between education outcomes and the demands of the future job market, South Africa is under increasing pressure to innovate. AI-driven solutions, from adaptive learning systems to data-enhanced teacher support, promise not only to improve the quality of education but also to provide critical upskilling opportunities for learners facing an uncertain economic future.

AI should be harnessed as an assistive tool to augment human capacity in South African education;empowering teachers, bridging inequities in access, enriching curriculum delivery and boosting learners’ employability;provided that its deployment is accompanied by investments in infrastructure, teacher training and ethical safeguards to ensure no one is left behind.

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Digital skills training for South Africa

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Digital information and communication technologies have revolutionised the ways in which knowledge is created and shared. Today, global domination of the information economy by the Internet, mobile phones and other digital devices creates the potential to facilitate new ways of recording and sharing knowledge. However, for the majority of South African people, limited digital skills and poor information literacy puts the Internet and online information beyond their reach, even if access to these technologies was available.

Accessing information on a mobile in South Africa

African Content on the Internet

In terms of digital information, African content levels are low, mainly due to a lack of capacity among local communities to record, transfer and disseminate information digitally. This puts Africa at a major disadvantage in the current knowledge economy, and leaves people poorly equipped to make a meaningful contribution to the global information society.

The knock-on effect of limited local content and a lack of local language usage on the Internet is that it slows the uptake of digital resources by local communities, impeding ICT skills development and, thereby, socio-economic transformation. However, African knowledge needs to be part of the global information economy, regardless of the inherent difficulties in collection, preservation and dissemination. This philosophy is underpinned by the Geneva Plan of Action, developed by the World Summit on the Information Society (2003). Three action lines in the plan speak directly to the need to include all people in the access to and generation of knowledge:

  • Access to information and knowledge: This line concerns policies relating to public domain information, community access points, and alternative software models.
  • Capacity building: This covers skills needed for the Information Society, including literacy and ‘ICT literacy’ and the empowerment of local communities to use ICTs.
  • Cultural diversity and identity: linguistic diversity and local content. This action plan line focuses on promotion of respect for cultural identity, traditions and religions and dialogue among cultures as a factor in sustainable development.

There is a tendency for digital divide thinking to focus on getting ‘global’ information resources to the marginalised and on educating the marginalised to consume information in the way the globalised world does. However, in order to decrease the digital divide between the data ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’, there needs to be an understanding of the processes by which people can assimilate, and then use, information. ICTs can become a broad enabler of development when used in community informatics, which allow groups to use the resources in ways that are meaningful to them. However, this is not easy to achieve in practice because skills levels are often low at a local level. 

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Memories of Inanda: Lulu Dube

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https://vimeo.com/11861694

Mwelela Cele interviews Lulu Dube as part of the Memories of Inanda documentary, produced for the eThekwini Municipality’s Ulwazi Programme. Lulu discusses her father John Langalibalele Dube, the founding of the African National Congress and life in Inanda.

John Dube (1871 – 1946) was a South African essayist, philosopher, educator, politician, publisher, editor, novelist and poet. He was the founding president of the African National Congress

Shot at the Dube family home in Inanda in April 2010.

Memories of Inanda: Baba Zondi

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https://vimeo.com/11679052

Mwelela Cele interviews Baba Zondi as part of the Memories of Inanda documentary, produced for the eThekwini Municipality’s Ulwazi Programme. Shot at Inanda Seminary, Zondi describes his time as headmaster and archivist of the school.

Inanda Seminary, founded by the American Board of Missions (ABM) in 1869 forms an integral part of the history of Inanda. Situated 25 kilometres north west of Durban, it became the first secondary school exclusively for African girls in southern Africa. Its reputation grew rapidly and the school soon attracted students from across the continent.

Memories of Inanda: Edward Ximba

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https://vimeo.com/12355643

Mwelela Cele interviews Edward Ximba as part of the Memories of Inanda documentary, produced for the eThekwini Municipality’s Ulwazi Programme. Mr Ximba discusses the Shembe Church.

Nazareth Baptist Church (Alternatively called “The Nazarite Church” “iBandla lamaNazaretha”, or the “Shembe Church”) is an African Initiated Church founded by Isaiah Shembe in 1910.

It has approximately 4 million members. The religion bans smoking, drinking, and fornicating. It is seen as a mixture of Zulu tradition and Christianity. It reveres Isaiah Shembe as an African Messiah and emphasises the Ten Commandments.