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Recent advances in LLMs and Generative AI have opened the possibility for every kid in the world to have a personal tutor/teacher, one that possess expertise across several domains of human knowledge, can converse in any language, personalize to the students' interest, and scaffold according to the student's ability. This is a unique opportunity to provide the means for countries of the Global South to leapfrog their educational systems and finally be able to deliver universal foundational literacy to those who have been left behind by the present system. At TTWF, we have created and piloted LiveGenie, a voice-enabled multimodal AI tutor encyclopedia to expand learning beyond just basic literacy and give students the kind of learning experience that does not merely teach them how to read, write, and count, but also sparks their curiosity of the world, helping them to thrive and achieve their true potential.
The core idea of this season is to shed light on some of the practical work that is being done is that leveraging AI & frontier technologies and how they are being used to help the most marginalized and underserved in the Global South, whose voices and circumstances are usually not taken into consideration when these systems & technologies are designed in Western contexts.
Most AI in education efforts put technology in front of students or teachers, requiring connectivity, devices, and training. This session presents something upstream of that: AI as capacity extender, completing the infrastructure that makes adoption possible before anything reaches a classroom. The STEPS project proved this model under extreme constraint, delivering 52 textbooks across three countries during a pandemic and active armed conflict in two of them, in settings with no reliable internet. The Adoptable Infrastructure Framework explains why it worked: good content fails without adoptable infrastructure around it. A fourth funded country deployment is now underway, and participants will see a live demonstration of the Intelligent Textbook Machine that automates this proven process.
Most sessions describe what AI and STEM education could do for underserved girls. This shows what they already did: building 4 Apps with special spotlight of STEAMSpark, a gamified STEAM and SDG learning platform, from near-zero digital experience. The session traces an unbroken line from UN policy to community programme to working product, led by an African NGO without imported expertise. Baseline-to-midline data documents the transformation: girls with 0% app design confidence reaching 72% at midline; family support rising from 62% to 94%. Two Nigerian women practitioners, a Tech Trainer and SDGs Expert, tell this story from the inside.
