From challenge to upgrade — behind the scenes with education ministries using AI to improve delivery
This blog synthesises the conversation from an AI Observatory webinar, launching the Ministries of Education AI Challenge.
The conversation on AI in education has focused on classrooms and learning tools — and that’s a good thing. But we’re missing another frontier: the power of AI to make the administrative systems that support education smarter, faster, and more effective.
The AI Observatory and Action Lab is testing and learning evidence and ideas to narrow the learning divide in the age of AI by supporting Ministries of Education to consider how AI could work within their systems. Earlier this year, we published a framework designed to increase evidence-based decision-making about AI today, while keeping sight of where education needs to go next.
By making government service delivery more efficient, ministries of education may be able to unlock important efficiencies, more accurately distribute resources, and ultimately create systems better suited and aligned for learning.
To help realise that goal, we invited ministries of education from low- and middle-income countries to apply to take part in a challenge exploring just that — how AI could support more efficient delivery of their education systems.
This webinar and blog focuses on addressing the question: How can we use AI to ‘Optimise the behind-the-scenes tasks at every level of the education system?’.
Selected ministries
Here’s a quick look at our selected ministries and what we’re working to test together:
- The Education Centre for AI Research (E-CAIR), part of the Philippines’ Department of Education, are looking at creating AI-driven tools that enhance teaching, learning, and school administration in the education sector.
- The Ministry of Education, Bangladesh, is interested in looking at how AI could boost its National Assessment Platform to help decision-makers see exactly where to send resources.
- The Federal Ministry of Education, Nigeria, hopes to explore how AI can be applied to improve data management and decision-making in education.
- The Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training, Pakistan, wants to develop an AI-driven app to administer foundational learning assessments to children across Pakistan.
- The Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary School Education, Sierra Leone, wants to develop practical tools that improve how their Delivery Team tracks progress, generates reports, and communicates.
- The Ministry of Education, Kenya, wants to explore ways to integrate AI into the Kenya Education Management Information System (KEMIS).
Featured speakers 🔉
- Dr Basti Ibanez – Philippines
- Hafrica During – Sierra Leone
- Shefatul Islam – Bangladesh
- Abubakar Isah – Nigeria
Watch the session 📺
Key takeaways 📝
Here are three key takeaways from the discussion about the role AI could play in ministries of education around the world:
- The scale of the challenge necessitates a new kind of intervention
The six countries which are part of EdTech Hub’s ‘Ministries of Education AI Challenge’ are based across two continents and between them, cover a multitude of cultures, languages, and contexts. And yet, there are similarities between them. Each of our panellists took a moment to acknowledge the scale of the challenge that they are facing: from the Philippines, with 26 million students and 900,000 public school teachers, to Nigeria, with 35 million children in education and 10 million not in education.
In Bangladesh, the National Assessment Platform is currently focused on the 10 million secondary school students. The team has plans to expand the platform to include primary students, bolstering the amount of data being processed to 80 million children.
In Nigeria, Abubakar Isah shared the current scenario: “From 12 million kids entering primary education each year, 16 years down the line, we are down to 500,000 university graduates, with dropouts at each stage. Something is not adding up.”
He continued to share questions that the Federal Ministry of Education will be looking at: “Our intention is to use this AI experience to find out: what is happening? Why are kids dropping out? Can we keep students in school? Can we provide alternative pathways for them in education or in their life journeys? So that we at the Ministry can design a programme tailored at intervention.”
- AI has the potential to be a transformative tool, and ministries are already adapting
Due to the sheer numbers of students, teachers, schools, and classrooms each ministry team is working with, the amount of data that is available is huge. Hafrica During, from Sierra Leone, spoke about how AI could help ministries leapfrog their resource constraints:
“Amongst thousands of schools and millions of students, AI can make things easier as we sift through hundreds of thousands of data points: the turnaround of data to insights will be faster, and therefore our strategy can be implemented more efficiently.”
Dr Basti Ibanez, from the Philippines, highlighted how AI is currently riding a hype wave and has captured the attention of the public. This high level of public interest can capture the imagination of ministries and help teams move beyond traditional working structures, enabling officers to focus on the priorities that matter.
- What is the role of people in these evolving systems?
“Policymakers are integral. AI as a tool is very broad — computer vision, audio speech recognition, natural language processing, etc. There are unique idiosyncrasies in each domain. And, each part of education has its own needs and unique stakeholders,” said Dr Basti Ibanez. “We can’t just have AI engineers or data scientists’ perspectives when designing AI systems — we need education policymakers, teachers, and people who deeply understand how learning and education work in different contexts.”
Dr Basti Ibanez’s observations echo ongoing conversations around how people are necessary to get the best out of technology.
Shefatul Islam, from Bangladesh, talked about how AI in the National Assessment Platform can work hand-in-hand with teachers and policymakers to create the best interventions for students.
“In certain areas in Bangladesh, we are seeing a 30% dropout rate of students from schools. We want to use signals from the data to work out what is happening with students’ attendance. Then we will use AI to provide interventions to help address this.”
He went on to describe examples of the kind of interventions that the Ministry of Education could make: “For example, if students are struggling with certain concepts, we can provide customised lesson plans for them, and support teachers with feedback to students. This information will then feed up to regional policymakers, and we can create wider interventions that work at scale for more of our students.”
Looking ahead with hope 🔭
To close the webinar, Hafrica During shared an example from her work. Upon hearing that the team from Sierra Leone would be part of EdTech Hub’s Ministries of Education AI Challenge, a colleague walked into her office and said, “This sounds exciting; I want to be part of this.”
“This is what we want. We want to create a team, a ministry, which is interested in and knowledgeable about AI,” Hafrica During added. “We want to move from asking ‘what is AI?’ to saying ‘AI helped us solve our problems.’ ”
EdTech Hub’s AI Observatory is made possible with the support of the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
