The goal is ambitious – that ‘every African learner – regardless of gender, location, disability or background – has affordable access to high-quality, localised digital learning resources on reliable devices, within an inclusive ecosystem that fosters innovation and entrepreneurship’.

In July 2025, the Africa Union Development Agency-Nepad (AUDA-Nepad) launched its draft framework for integrating technology into classrooms across Africa. The African EdTech 2030: Vision, Plan and Policy framework sets out the roadmap to transform the continent’s education systems using technology and positioning it as a leader in mobile-first, locally relevant digital learning. It is hoping the continent can harness digital technology to leapfrog the many challenges in the education sector, just as mobile money tech helped to propel the continent’s financial sector into the future.

Among those challenges are the quality of education and the shortage of about 15 million teachers, according to a new report by Boston Consulting Group titled Boosting Education Technology in Africa. Of course, those teachers will need to be digitally enabled as well as their school pupils.

The AUDA-Nepad draft framework lays out a six-point plan to achieve its vision. Third on the list, after expanding digital access and developing appropriate courseware, is improving teacher capacity. That will involve upskilling teachers in digital pedagogy, content curation and data use with ‘specific emphasis on fostering positive attitudes and building confidence in using technology for learning’.

The framework envisages using low-cost devices to roll out digital technology, taking advantage of the fact smartphone ownership among teachers is growing – estimated at 90% in South Africa and up to 65% in countries such as Ghana, Nigeria and Kenya.

However, governments are already having to battle opposition to the digital roll-out, with many fearing technology will take the place of teachers.

For example, according to BBC News Africa, there has been pushback in Malawi against the education department’s initiative to distribute basic tablets to primary schools to help children learn to read and do maths. Detractors of the scheme argued that the money would be better spent on training more teachers.

Takumana Primary School in rural Malawi is demonstrating how technology can help teachers, not replace them. In a classroom of 40 children and one teacher, the children spend 30 minutes a day on the tablets and are assessed in real-time by the app as they read, leaving the teacher to concentrate on helping those who really need it.

‘On the surface, it may seem to be expensive. [The tablets] don’t come cheap now, but when you look at the long-term effect and impact, I think it’s great,’ Joshua Valeta, director of open, distance and e-learning in the Ministry of Education, told the BBC. He added that ‘apart from learning outcomes, [the tablets] are also increasing attendance. They’re even increasing enrolment’. And increasing enrolment would presumably mean entrenching the need for teachers.

‘Computer-aided instruction [CAI] has a number of benefits, not least of which is that it can serve as an instructional support in areas where there is no teacher,’ according to Mary Burns, a senior technology and teacher professional development specialist at the Education Development Centre in Washington DC.

In her 2023 report on distance education for teacher training, she also enumerates other benefits. ‘It measures learner progress in a learning task and uses those data to adapt instruction in real time, thus potentially helping teachers better evaluate the learning needs of students and tailor instruction and supports to personalise that instruction,’ says Burns.

It can free up teachers not only to help learners who are struggling, but also to create more meaningful, individualised content. ‘CAI might be most useful for teachers who are teaching outside their content areas or who have weak content skills.’

For many edtech developers in Africa, teachers are at the very centre of creating context-appropriate courseware.

During a June 2025 edtech discussion panel hosted by the Mastercard Foundation on CNBC Africa, Mukundi Lambani, co-founder of Ambani Africa, highlighted the importance of engagement with the teaching profession to ensure new technology is in line with policy and school curricula. ‘So at the time of launch, [the developers] have buy-in, because the content was co-created by the educators,’ she said.

However, collaboration with teachers shouldn’t stop there, said Lambani, stressing the need to move away from once-off workshops held to introduce the technology to teachers, to off-line support too.

After launching its Ambani Kids App, an edutainment platform for learning African languages, which won the Business App of the Year at the MTN Awards in 2021, Ambani set up WhatsApp groups as a forum for teachers to share tips and tricks on using the new technology.

On the same discussion panel, Adolf Kinyero, the senior ICT officer at the Tanzania Institute of Education (TIE), highlighted the need for more teacher training for the country to achieve its digitalisation goals, which he described as being in its early stages. This was being achieved through in-service teacher continuous development training using an LMS [learning management system] platform, he said.

Faced with the enormous cost of retooling its teachers for a digital future, Tanzania adopted a unique approach. Laptops used in the country’s 2022 census were distributed to the country’s teachers. When it became evident that many were reluctant to use the devices, the TIE decided to use mandated training for the new 2023 curriculum ‘as an enforcement mechanism for the teachers to use the devices. At the headquarters of TIE we have an AI-smart classroom, so a facilitator sitting in the headquarters was facilitating to the teachers across the country in zones. We did three regions at once and kept going until the whole country was covered’.

Building on this experience, Tanzania will start to roll out digital content for secondary schools early next year, said Kinyero.

Mohamed Goga, MD of distance learning institution Mancosa, points to AI as a useful tool in tertiary education. While his focus is on post-school education, his insights also have use in the basic education sector.

He told the JSE Magazine that responsible AI can be used to analyse data on student behaviour, engagement with learning materials and assessment outcomes, and can then provide personalised learning pathways adaptive to individual learning needs.

While AI could significantly enhance student/learner performance as their learning aligns with their individualised needs, Goga warns that it could also compound digital education’s broader problem.

‘There is no shortage of benefits to discuss, simply the purely technical adoption and application of AI tools in teaching,’ he says. ‘However, we must also unpack the deeper implications tech like this may have. We also need to use AI ethically. The adoption of AI in teaching needs to be understood in the context of South Africa’s deeply unequal school system, where well-resourced schools will have access to this type of tech. At the same time, there are schools significantly under-resourced. There is a strong likelihood that well-resourced schools will benefit from tech-based education models while under-resourced schools run the risk of falling behind.’

Advancing edtech might seem like a no-brainer, but its use in Africa – either as a tool to train educators or for educators to teach learners – requires a nuanced approach that draws on lessons that are uniquely African.

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