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African schools gear up for the AI revolution

The emergence of cheap or free AI tools is being eagerly embraced by those with smartphones and the ability to get online. As governments and legislators struggle to get their heads around the implications of this powerful technology and work out how to bring in regulations for its safe use, millions of people are enjoying its ability to save time, helping them to transforming raw data into essays, exam answers, or, with a bit more work, even videos and podcasts.

Even in developing countries where electricity and internet access is limited (it’s estimated that over 570 million people in Africa lack electricity), there is enthusiasm for the potential of AI. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), for example, a nation riven by internal conflict, poverty and vast inequality, educators are seeing the impact of AI. “It is obvious that our country is lagging behind in terms of new technologies for one reason or another,” says Benjamin Sivanzire, a teacher in Beni, North Kivu Province. “Many parts of the DRC do not even have traditional methods of communication, or even radio or television.” However, even though Mr. Sivanzire and his students are not yet able to make use of AI in their classes, they are seeing it being used in the wider culture, often in a negative way, to manipulate public opinion. The teacher underlines the importance of educating people to distinguish between verifiable information and lies. “There are videos created by artificial intelligence that show images that are not real and have been created for propaganda purposes,” he explains.

One concern that is frequently raised is the extent to which the development of AI tools is concentrated in the hands of a relatively small group of people. Farida Shahid, the independent Special Rapporteur on the right to education, shares these concerns. “AI algorithms are being made by individuals who often sit in a particular location, such as Silicon Valley, where the people who make and test them have their own biases,” she says. “Often the algorithms don’t do well at recognizing people with dark skin. They also have great problems with people who are autistic and don’t like looking into cameras. “Another example is the UK where, recently, an AI program was used to grade exam papers. This led to decisions that were biased against people from certain ethnic backgrounds. We really need to look at this issue more closely, starting with the human rights perspective, and I think that’s where the U.N. role comes in: if you increasingly rely on AI as the source of verification, you’re going to have problems because you are using a framework  which privileges white males, and doesn’t reflect the whole gamut of people’s lives and experiences”.

The urgent need to expand the developer talent base has been identified by the UN as central to ensuring that a wide variety of voices are heard in the “EdTech” (educational technology) space. Shafika Isaacs, the head of technology and AI at the UN agency for science, technology and education (UNESCO), says that the number of African EdTech startups has been mushrooming in recent years, with entrepreneurs experimenting with the AIenabled digital tools which could support learning and teaching across many different contexts, including in African languages, and local dialects. “I’ve personally engaged with a startup that matches high school students to career pathways, including choosing the right university, community college or even entrepreneurship program. They have seen strong results because of their focus on children in underprivileged contexts and schools. Tech startups have also looked at developing AI-enabled mobile apps, including chat bots, that can support teachers in teaching literacy or teaching mathematics. “The challenge is that there’s often a disconnect between the public education system and tech startups. We need educators to be proactive in engaging with those developing tools, and we encourage students and teachers to learn how to create and design technologies that are relevant to their linguistic and cultural contexts.”

Many African governments are keen to adopt national AI strategies and integrate AI into their national policies on technologies in education. In Côte d’Ivoire, where AI is already being widely used in the private sector, Mariatou Koné, the Minister of Education, says that the country’s education system is undergoing a transformation, following a 2022 review which recommended a digitalization strategy. “We have put in place initiatives to ensure that everyone is aware of the issue of AI. It can provide individual learning programs, and help struggling students to improve,” said Ms. Koné. “However, we are worried about potential abuses. We have to be able to protect personal data and ensure that learners are aware of the potential dangers.” The Minister agrees that, in order to guard against bias, the pool of engineers building AI tools needs to be expanded. “We need the right tools, adapted to the African context, to the Ivorian context. We have our own history, our own heritage. If we create our own industry, it has to be adapted to the realities of Côte d’Ivoire.”

Available at: https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/01/1159621. Retrieved on: January 6, 2026. Adapted.

Read the following text and answer the next five question.

The implications of a rapidly changing information ecosystem on how governments communicate 

    Public communication does not happen in a vacuum: the context in which it occurs is core to understanding the challenges and opportunities it faces. Indeed, the analysis of its role for policy and governance mechanisms is made urgent by shifts in the information ecosystem that have transformed the function over the past decade and raised important implications for democracy. The technological revolution that has connected the world through social media has given rise to online social movements and simplified the creation and sharing of content and data. Such changes have also facilitated, however, the spread of mis- and disinformation, contributed to undermining the role of traditional information gatekeepers, and have fundamentally changed how governments communicate. Whereas until the early 2000s a so-called “one-to-many” model of communication prevailed, this has shifted today to a “many-to-many” model. Anyone can be both a producer and a consumer of information, and anybody with an internet connection has the potential to engage with and influence public debates.

    Traditionally, governments had largely relied on traditional media to amplify official messages to reach citizens. With the advent of digital channels, this approach has gradually lost its primacy to direct institution-to-individual communication via online platforms that bypass traditional media. This shift has also enabled a broader scope for governments to communicate about more diverse policy issues targeted to more specific audiences, as traditional media tend to concentrate on “newsworthy” subjects and political affairs, often under-reporting less mainstream issues. The unprecedented volumes of data that promise to make communication ever more precise, combined with the direct, unmediated access to vast and diverse publics, are some of the opportunities and challenges that have emerged.

    At the same time, digital platforms have altered patterns in eople’s consumption of information and raised demands on their attention. The latter has become a resource that technology companies sell to advertisers. In turn, the design of online platforms and their algorithms, and the massive increase in the volume of information served to increase competition for what content people pay attention to, while making focus more superficial. As governments compete with all other information sources for the public’s attention, cognitive and psychological factors such as information overload can undermine the efficacy of even well-crafted content.

    Online and social media have also heightened the pace at which information travels, accelerated the news cycle, and enabled a wider range of actors to drive discussions on policy issues. Taken together, digital technologies have produced a complex information ecosystem that has made it more challenging for official messages to “cut through the noise”. Cumulatively, these changes require considerable adjustments to practices, public officials’ skills, and even to how communication is organised, if governments are to make the most of the digital transformation and ensure it can promote better governance. […]

    The ability for governments to use the communication function to promote constructive democratic spaces is critically threatened by widespread mis- and disinformation. When falsehoods spread extensively and rapidly on issues of public policy, official messages are drowned out, creating significant challenges for public communicators to get key information out to all groups in society. Whether in the context of elections, health crises, migration or climate change, mis- and disinformation cast evidence and facts into doubt, sow distrust, and work against policy goals.

Adapted from: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/ reports/2021/12/oecd-report-on-public-communication_b74311bc/22f8031c-en.pdf 

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Some History of English... in two words

    In 1582, Richard Mulcaster, headmaster of the Merchant Tailors’ school1 wrote that “our English tung is of small reatch, it stretcheth no further than this Iland of ours”. It didn’t stay that way. Today, English is spoken by more than a billion people all over the world. It is a colourful, vibrant and diverse tongue, that long has picked up words from the many languages with which its speakers have come into contact.

    One such word is Dictionary. It is a borrowing from medieval Latin dictionarius liber “book of words”; it first appeared in English in the 16th century, along with numerous adoptions from Latin and Greek.

    Dr Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), although the most famous, is not the earliest; the first English dictionary was Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall (1604). Unlike a modern desk dictionary, Cawdrey set out to gloss only the most unfamiliar words, such as deambulate, pactation, and refractarie – whose meanings would have caused problems for those not educated in Latin and Greek.

    Another such word is Emoji2 , originally developed in Japan in the 1990s for use by teenagers on their pagers; the word emoji derives from the Japanese e “picture” + moji “character, letter”. Its successful integration into English has been helped by its similarity to words with the e-“electronic” prefix, such as e-mail and e-book. E-communication is a form of writing that resembles casual conversation more than formal prose, often situated in real time with a known recipient, but lacking the extra-linguistic cues such as facial expression, tone of voice, hand gestures, that help to convey attitude in face-toface interactions, and users are finding creative new ways to employ emojis.

(https://theconversation.com/Adaptado. Acesso em 18.08.2015)

1 a public school for 11-18 year olds, founded in 1561 in London just for boys back then.

2 iconic, visual representation of an idea, entity, feeling, status or event used alongside or instead of words in digital messaging. The plural form in English is either emoji or emojis.