What Ghana Can Learn from UNESCO, Malawi, and Itself: Building a Culturally Rooted AI Literacy Agenda

What Ghana Can Learn from UNESCO, Malawi, and Itself: Building a Culturally Rooted AI Literacy Agenda

Introduction

We are beyond the stage of debating whether AI belongs in education. The real question now is how, for whom, and to what end AI literacy should be built, especially in contexts like Ghana, where education systems carry both promise and precarity. The global North is accelerating. But closer to home, countries like Malawi are innovating in ways Ghana should not ignore

1. UNESCO’s Blueprint for AI in Education

UNESCO recently launched two AI Competency Frameworks—one for students, another for teachers. These aren't aspirational dreams. They are carefully scaffolded models detailing what AI literacy should look like across cognitive levels, teaching ethics, technical skills, and design thinking (unesco.org).

The teacher framework, in particular, offers 15 core competencies organised around understanding, designing, applying, and critically evaluating AI. This gives Ghana a ready-made policy blueprint. It allows us to shift from scattered digital experiments to a structured national vision—if we dare to act.

2. Ghana’s Present: Good Intentions, Incomplete Action

Ghana has embedded digital literacy in its 2019 national curriculum and now introduces AI-related modules in Computing and STEM classes. But AI-specific training for teachers? Still rare. National AI education policy? Still in progress. Public access to localised generative tools? Still limited.

The Ministry of Education has signalled intent to integrate AI across levels, but the machinery to do so remains underfunded and fragmented. Ghana is not behind because it lacks innovation. It is behind because it hasn’t yet aligned policy, teacher preparation, and local design into a coherent ecosystem.

3. Malawi’s Ulangizi: A Model of Context-First AI

While Ghana wrestles with abstraction, Malawi is quietly building AI into rural reality. Opportunity International launched Ulangizi, a Chichewa-speaking chatbot that provides crop advice to farmers and assists rural teachers in planning lessons, both offline and in local languages (time.com).

Ulangizi is more than a tool. It’s a philosophy: AI must meet people where they are, not pull them where they can’t go. Ghana should adapt this model, developing offline-first AI resources tailored for underserved schools in Dagbani, Twi, Ewe, and Ga.

4. Building Forward: From Imported Frameworks to Indigenous Fluency

What would a future-ready, Ghanaian-centred AI literacy agenda look like?

Policy Backbone: Adopt UNESCO’s frameworks, then localise them with the NTC and NaCCA to fit Ghana’s sociocultural landscape.

Teacher Training First: Before AI reaches every classroom, it must be demystified for every teacher.

Multilingual Tools: Fund development of AI platforms that can understand, process, and respond in Ghanaian languages, modelled after Ulangizi.

Curriculum Integration: Introduce AI across Arts, not just STEM. Creative thinking, ethics, language, and design must shape our AI fluency.

Ethical Grounding: Teach students to not just use AI but to question it, shape it, and imagine better uses.

Conclusion

AI is not the enemy of education. But uncritical adoption is. Ghana must treat AI not as imported magic but as a tool to be Ghanaianized—coded with culture, taught with context, and wielded with care. The frameworks are there. The cues are clear. It is time we start building our own rhythm into the global AI literacy beat.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

From Classroom to Canopy: How Ghanaian Youth Are Using AI to Guard the Forest

  From Classroom to Canopy: How Ghanaian Youth Are Using AI to Guard the Forest Introduction In June 2025, Ghanaian student innovators won a global accolade with Climate Sentinel , an AI‑powered IoT system designed to track deforestation in real time. At the same time, Ghanaian teachers are piloting AI-powered OER creation through the Teacher‑in‑the‑Loop (TiL AI) model. These stories highlight how AI literacy grounded in local needs can drive social and environmental progress in Ghana. 1. Climate Sentinel: Protecting Forests with Smart Tech Developed by Ghanaian students, Climate Sentinel integrates IoT sensors and AI algorithms to detect deforestation activities such as illegal logging. It rapidly processes satellite data, triggering alerts and empowering faster response. This innovation garnered the Global ICT Award , showcasing how youth‑led AI solutions can meet critical sustainability needs and bring recognition to Ghana’s tech ecosystem. 2. Teachers Leading the Change: ...
Read more

Ghana’s AI literacy moment: Why teacher empowerment matters more than tech

  Ghana’s AI literacy moment: Why teacher empowerment matters more than tech Introduction AI is no longer a distant novelty—it is already reshaping learning, work, and policy in Ghana. Students are using tools like ChatGPT for writing and research. But behind the algorithms and systems, the real shift is happening in the classroom—starting with Ghana’s teachers. 1. AI’s silent revolution in Ghanaian tertiary classrooms According to The Business & Financial Times, tertiary students use generative AI to produce essays, simulate arguments, and draft outlines  thebftonline.com.  myjoyonline.com . This rapid shift isn’t only changing academic practices—it’s forcing universities to rethink plagiarism, fairness, and how real learning happens when shortcuts are available. 2. Teacher education is the missing link The MyJoyOnline article warns that 70% of sub‑Saharan learners lack even basic digital tools, and only 24% of teachers have received any ICT training  myjoyonline.co...
Read more

THE DEMISE OF MARCH (GHANA MONTH)

THE DEMISE OF MARCH (GHANA MONTH) The month of March was dubbed ‘GHANA MONTH’ to promote our ‘imagined’ Ghanaian cultural heritage, better still to develop it. Institutionalizing the month of March as the only the period that one can celebrate his/her culture illuminate a ‘system’ on the verge of failure. Come to think of it, the outbreak of the novel COVID-19 has disrupted the core ‘rituals’ of the Ghanaian culture. ‘ Culture is a process not an event’  If we are to promote our ‘imagined’ Ghanaian culture, it requires regular daily routines, not a ‘myopic’ display of spastic shows. Why not the campaign, for quality sustained activities to promote our cultural heritage, with calm continuity than the one-month spectacle of extravagance? A culture like a live plant requires constant nurturing, if this was to be the case, we will not have been drawing attention to our cultural values only during the so-called ‘Ghana Month’. This act can be compared to asthmatic bre...
Read more