To mark the next stage of Signal Library, Guest Curators highlight three resources—two discovered through Signal Library, and one exclusive resource from their own work—with context on why it matters for navigating developments in AI and education across low- and middle-income countries. Signal Library’s fourth Guest Curator is Md. Shefatul Islam, Research Officer at the Directorate of Secondary and Higher Education’s (DSHE) Research and Innovation Division, Bangladesh.
About our guest
Md. Shefatul Islam
Research Officer, Research and Innovation Division, Directorate of Secondary and Higher Education (DSHE), Bangladesh
Shefat is an economist who has spent eight years at the front line of Bangladesh’s education technology, from classroom to Ministry. He began making visual explainers for students without lab access, and still creates educational videos and hosts a podcast. At a2i he managed Noipunno, the country’s award-winning national assessment platform. He also helped develop the Blended Education Master Plan and, with UNESCO, its AI readiness framework.
Shefat now leads AI and technology planning at the Directorate of Secondary and Higher Education, where he turns global evidence into decisions for millions of learners. His curation reflects that job: finding the research that helps a government decide what to do next.
Here’s Shefat’s curation:
1. AI labs target $6tn education market
Shefat’s curatorial note: “When Anthropic and OpenAI offer free and cut-price tools to schools, a country like ours [Bangladesh] should feel both gratitude and unease. The hope is real: a well-built AI tutor could put patient, personalised teaching within reach of a child in a village that has never had a subject teacher. But ‘free’ is seldom free. A $6tn market does not draw these labs for charity, it draws them for the data, the dependence, and the default position they secure in a generation’s learning. If foreign models quietly become the curriculum’s co-author, we outsource not just software but pedagogy and sovereignty. The answer isn’t to refuse the tools, but to adopt them on our terms, local content, data rules, and public capability.”
2. Gates: Governments unprepared for AI
Shefat’s curatorial note: “Bill Gates says governments are ‘way behind’ on AI. That’s true everywhere, but I see it most clearly from inside a ministry in Bangladesh, where we are planning for AI with too few teachers and too few doctors. That is exactly why his foundation’s $1 billion matters: AI can extend what one teacher or one health worker can do. I’m most interested in the pledge to make language models work in every language people speak. For us, that means Bangla, and it will decide whether these tools reach our students at all. But donated tools won’t close the gap. We need the capacity to choose them, run them and pay for them ourselves.”
3. শিক্ষা কারিকুলামে বড় পরিবর্তন, ২০২৭ সাল থেকে নতুন বই ও বাধ্যতামূলক শারীরিক শিক্ষা (‘Big changes in education curriculum, new books and mandatory physical education from 2027’)
🔎 Dhaka Times, 26 April 2026; Source: Here
Shefat chose a Bangla-language news report from Dhaka Times on Bangladesh’s newly announced curriculum reform, a signal that rarely reaches English-language debates about AI in education, and read it against a decade of reforms he has seen up close.
Shefat’s curatorial note: “It’s encouraging to see a curriculum that finally names AI and robotics, makes physical education compulsory, and asks children to learn with happiness. But I’ve watched two reforms—the 2010 creative method and the 2022 competency curriculum—falter on the same rock: we redesign the textbook faster than we prepare the teacher. A 200-member panel can write a brilliant syllabus, yet AI cannot be taught by teachers who have never used it, in schools without power, devices or bandwidth. The minister’s assurance that selection is expertise-driven, not political, matters, but the real test is recurrent budget, connectivity and training, not the 2028 launch date. Reform succeeds only where it meets ground reality. Let’s fund the classroom, not just the curriculum.”
Want to be our next Guest Curator?
We’re building a growing network of voices shaping how education stakeholders understand AI developments. If you’re working on AI policy implementation, digital transformation, or education research in low- and middle-income countries, we’d love to hear from you.
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Extra Resources
Thanks to Shefat for his expert curation. You can learn more about the Directorate of Secondary and Higher Education in Bangladesh and Shefat’s work here:
Shefat contributed to this national assessment of how ready Bangladesh is for AI, from infrastructure and connectivity to skills and governance. It’s a useful background to his curation, and to the gap between policy ambition and classroom reality that runs through his notes.
Shefat hosts this podcast, which brings parents, teachers and policymakers into conversation about the future of education in Bangladesh and the policies shaping it.
This video series grew out of Shefat’s early experience tutoring students who had no access to a lab. It turns difficult biology, physics, chemistry and ICT topics for grades 8 to 10 into short visual explainers students can follow on their own. It was developed with a2i’s service innovation programme.
Thanks to Md. Shefatul Islam and the team at DSHE for their expert curation.
Funding EdTech Hub’s AI Observatory is made possible with the support of the UK International Development.
