MTN Foundation, Microsoft empower Nigerian educators with AI integration skills

The MTN Foundation, in collaboration with the Senator Abiru Innovation Lab (SAIL) and Co-Creation Hub, recently held a training session for educators across Nigeria. This event was part of the ongoing 12-week Teachers Programme, an initiative designed to enhance digital skills in the classroom. The programme is designed to equip classroom teachers with artificial intelligence tools and skills to improve teaching and learning outcomes in the 21st century.

Facilitating the programme’s 10th week, Oluwatobi Olayanju, a data scientist and business analyst at Data Science Nigeria, led a virtual session focused on AI literacy, responsible technology use, and the practical integration of AI into lesson delivery. The training engaged educators from across Nigeria who have been participating in the series since its inception, with attendees reporting gains in skills ranging from 2D animation and cloud-based note-taking to advanced AI-powered lesson planning and content creation.

The programme is the latest in a series of corporate-led education interventions in Nigeria, a country where the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) says is characterised by a critical education bottleneck, with over 10.2 million primary school-aged children out of school, the highest number in the world. When factoring in secondary-age adolescents, that number climbs to nearly 20 million, making Nigeria one of the top three countries globally for youth exclusion from education. While out-of-school figures remain alarming, advocates argue that upskilling teachers already in classrooms is an equally urgent priority.

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Nigeria’s National Policy on Education tasks teachers with being facilitators of modern learning, yet a 2022 survey by the Brookings Institution found that fewer than 30 per cent of sub-Saharan African teachers had received any form of digital skills training. The MTN Foundation’s SAIL programme directly addresses this gap.

Olayanju walked participants through a broad ecosystem of AI tools available to educators, including chatbots for lesson planning, visual design platforms, text-to-video and text-to-audio converters, and assessment generators. He also introduced participants to ditchthattextbook.com, which he described as “a centralised repository that aggregates these essential resources,” a platform dedicated to helping educators discover and apply modern digital tools in their practice.

“Educators can leverage these tools for visual design, lesson planning, and content creation. The capabilities extend to advanced multimedia integration, such as converting text to video or audio and generating podcasts with tools like NotebookLM,” he told participants. “These features are designed to captivate students and foster a more engaging and immersive learning environment.”

The session also included an interactive quiz component via quiz.com, testing participants on what they had absorbed throughout the programme’s 10 weeks. Feedback from the chat room indicated high engagement, with educators citing gains in productivity tools, AI-assisted lesson planning, and student assessment design.

Joy Medupin, who manages the training arm of the programme on behalf of Co-Creation Hub, described the energy among participants as remarkable. With two more training weeks remaining before a final project phase, organisers say the programme is on course to produce a cohort of educators fully equipped to teach and assess in an AI-integrated environment.