A professor of Cybersecurity and Managing Director of Galaxy Backbone Limited, Prof. Ibrahim Adeyanju, has called on African leaders to modernise and revolutionalize education with Artificial Intelligence.
Prof. Adeyanju made this call in Abuja while delivering the maiden Public Lecture of the African School of Economics (The Pan-African University of Excellence) on “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Higher Education in Africa” on Thursday, January 30, 2025.
He emphasised the importance of education in advancing sustainable development and achieving socio-economic growth.
He regretted that despite the progress that Africa has made in recent years, it is still constrained by backwardness in education which has limited its capacity to compete with some other regions of the world.
The AI expert identified low teacher effectiveness and high out-of-school are some of the problems thwarting the educational development of Africans. While advocated for the integration of AI to address the challenges facing education in Africa.
According to him, “AI can revolutionalise African education through language learning, chatbots, virtual classrooms. It can also provide tailored learning experiences and improve access to quality education in remote areas.”
Prof. Adeyanju recommended forging culturally grounded and ethical frameworks, empowering educators through comprehensive training, bridging digital divides with strategic initiatives, fostering indigenous AI solutions and addressing infrastructural deficits among others as part of the way forward for Africans to cope with the challenges of the future.
Earlier in his address, which he tagged “The Past is Present, The Future is Now”, the Vice Chancellor of African School of Economics (The Pan-African University of Excellence), who was also the Chief Host at the event, Prof. Mahfouz Adedimeji, decried the tendency of many people these days to outsource their natural intelligence to Artificial Intelligence.
He suggested the need for ethical frameworks in AI utilisation and sounded a note caution while likening AI to water and fire that are indispensable and useful as long as we are in control of them, but dangerous when out of control of human beings that they serve.
The Vice-Chancellor also used the medium to describe African School of Economics as a conventional university offering a wide variety of academic programmes including Cybersecurity, Software Engineering, International Relations, Microbiology, Medical Laboratory Science, Public Health among others into which admissions are still open this year.
