AI and Inclusive Education in the African Context: Navigating Digital Divide Gaps, Building Equitable Futures

2025-12-14T14:08:59+01:00

This position paper argues that the rapid, largely uncritical adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in education, defined here as computational systems capable of language understanding, pattern recognition, and adaptive learning, risks deepening longstanding digital inequities in Sub-Saharan Africa, with disproportionately severe consequences for children with disabilities. Drawing on regional infrastructure data (GSMA, 2024; International Telecommunication Union, 2024), policy analyses (UNESCO, 2023; United Nations, 2024a), and emerging African-led scholarship (Anokwuru et al., 2025; Muchandiona et al., 2025), we demonstrate how uneven access to electricity, broadband, devices, and digital literacy undermines equitable AI integration in inclusive education systems.

AI-enabled tools, including text-to-speech, real-time captioning, adaptive platforms, and multilingual assistive technologies, hold documented potential to support learners with disabilities (Fitas, 2025; Salhab, 2025). However, these benefits remain concentrated in urban, well-resourced contexts. In rural and low-income settings, where infrastructure deficits are most acute (International Energy Agency, 2024; World Bank, 2024), children with disabilities experience compounded exclusion. While challenges are significant, targeted investments and context-specific adaptations can make the deployment of inclusive AI feasible even in resource-limited settings. Their absence, therefore, constitutes a disproportionate educational harm rather than a shared inconvenience (Mpu, 2023; Muchandiona et al., 2025).

We synthesize current evidence to (a) map how digital infrastructure and AI adoption intersect with disability inclusion across South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria; (b) identify structural gaps in teacher preparation, assistive technology deployment, and culturally responsive AI design; and (c) propose an equity-centered research and policy agenda grounded in participatory, disability-led approaches. The paper calls for coordinated, locally anchored investment to ensure AI narrows, rather than entrenches, educational exclusion.

Learning With One Another: Storytelling, Community, and the Co-Creation of Neuroaffirming Educational Practice

2026-02-13T08:32:31+01:00

This paper examines narrative and storytelling as mechanisms for supporting neuroaffirming educational practice in higher education. As a group of teachers and academic developers working across disciplines in universities in Australia and the UK, we observe that professional development in inclusive teaching does not adequately centre lived experience as a form of knowledge. Staff training often focuses on definitional understandings of disability and surface-level recommendations for inclusive practice, with limited space for the complexity and relational dimensions of neurodivergent experience. While many educators carry powerful stories shaped by neurodivergence, there are few structured opportunities within institutional contexts to articulate, share and collectively interpret these narratives.

Our project explored whether creative and reflective writing could provide a shared language for our knowledge and experiences, and whether storytelling might function as a mode of neuroaffirming practice in its own right. During Academic Writing Month (#AcWriMo), we came together as part of an international ‘creative pedagogies’ project to write and exchange stories of neuroaffirming teaching and learning. Initially, as strangers across geographic and institutional boundaries, we found camaraderie in shared experience. The paper centres four of these narratives, presenting selected extracts alongside engagement with literature on neuroaffirming pedagogy, expressive writing and communities of practice.

We argue that storytelling and freeform writing enable reflective meaning-making that extends beyond conventional professional development models. Writing stories of practice, struggle and growth created space for participants to surface tacit knowledge, interrogate assumptions and reframe experiences that might otherwise remain individualised. In sharing these narratives, participants contributed to a collective archive of experience that educates and empowers. The stories operate not as illustrative anecdotes appended to theory, but as sites of knowledge production that complicate and enrich dominant discourses of inclusion.

In this context, storytelling functions simultaneously as pedagogy and community-building practice. The act of writing and reading each other’s stories fostered relational connections across institutions and national borders, enabling educators to learn with one another rather than merely from one another. This shift from transmission of best practice to co-construction of meaning models a neuroaffirming approach grounded in reciprocity, compassion and attentiveness to difference.

Our unorthodox methodology borrows from the Dadaists sense play. Writing as separately authored pieces, we create a tapestry of voices woven together by a theoretical thread. A practice-based collaborative autoethnography using poetic inquiry to explore academic and neurodivergent lived experience.

By focusing on narrative as both method and outcome, this paper demonstrates how story-based practices can cultivate accessible communities of practice. We suggest that embedding creative, reflective storytelling within academic development initiatives offers a pathway for advancing neuroaffirming education across disciplines, institutions and geographic contexts.

NeuroConverse

AI and Inclusive Education in the African Context: Navigating Digital Divide Gaps, Building Equitable Futures

Learning With One Another: Storytelling, Community, and the Co-Creation of Neuroaffirming Educational Practice