Education Futures

Pegor Papazian is Chief Development Officer at the TUMO Center for Creative Technologies, the innovative after-school programme for teenagers that was founded in Armenia and has now become a global phenomenon. He trained and practised as an architect before switching to computer science at MIT, where he was a member of the AI Lab.

He founded a Barcelona firm doing computational GIS and urban planning, was a partner in a California software company, and went on to serve as CEO of the National Competitiveness Foundation of Armenia and Head of Program Development at USAID Armenia. He moved to Armenia twenty years ago with his wife, Marie Lou Papazian — TUMO's founding CEO — and their five children. Watching those children enter the Armenian school system became part of the inspiration behind TUMO.

Fifteen years on, TUMO teaches over 35,000 teenagers on a weekly basis across more than 25 centres in 15 countries — including centres in Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, Takasaki, Astana, Kutaisi, Mumbai, Luanda and Beirut — free of charge, with no grades, no exams, no diplomas and no teachers. In November 2025 TUMO won first place in the WISE Prize for Education for its AI "colearner" platform, which had already taken a top prize in the Learning Engineering Tools Competition. Pegor co-authored "Frankenstein Curricula" with Zachary Pardos for MIT Open Learning's AI + Open Education Initiative, and co-authored TUMO's July 2026 strategy paper, "Making, thinking and learning when capability is no longer scarce."

In this episode, Pegor talks with Svenia Busson about:

• Why capability — writing, coding, illustration — is now commoditised, and why authorship and connection are what became scarce
• "Walk-away pedagogy": the thought experiment behind TUMO — if teenagers could walk away from school without consequence, what would bring them back?
• The AI colearner that deliberately lags behind and asks the student for help — learning by teaching, built into software
• Why TUMO rejected AI tutors, and why the colearner breaks the fourth wall to remind teens it is not a friend
• Why the colearner made students go deeper rather than faster — and what that says about the "two-hour learning" promise
• TUMO's partnership with Anthropic to test the model on maths and reading in Brazil, India and Kenya, and where national curricula may break it
• Why he is against gamification — "Do Not Gamify", his UNESCO Digital Learning Week talk — and the sugar-high problem with streaks and badges
• What 90 teenagers said at ai/teens, the 24-hour conference they ran themselves across 16 cities: AI as a cheat code you use without letting go of the controller
• The licensing-plus-philanthropy model that keeps TUMO free, from Forum des Images in Paris to the State of California in Los Angeles
• The paradox he leaves us with: as AI gets better at teaching something, your reason to learn it from AI disappears

Links mentioned

• TUMO — https://tumo.org
• TUMO's AI work / colearner — https://tumo.ai
• "Making, thinking and learning when capability is no longer scarce" — https://tumo.org/authorship-and-connection
• ai/teens report — https://tumo.ai/teens/report (PDF: https://tumo.ai/assets/pdf/ai_teens.pdf)
• WISE Prize — https://www.wise-qatar.org · Tools Competition — https://tools-competition.org

Zoe Weil is the co-founder and president of the Institute for Humane Education (IHE), which she launched with Rae Sikora in 1996 after teaching environmental and animal-protection courses to twelve- and thirteen-year-olds at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987. She holds an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School and an M.A. and B.A. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania.

Over nearly four decades, Weil built the field of comprehensive humane education — teaching across the intersections of human rights, environmental sustainability, and animal protection — and created IHE's graduate programs, delivered with Antioch University. She developed the Solutionary Framework, a four-phase process (identify, investigate, innovate, implement) now taught by more than a thousand educators across the US and over 80 countries. She is the author of eight books, including The Solutionary Way (2024, with a foreword by Jane Goodall) and The World Becomes What We Teach: Educating a Generation of Solutionaries, has delivered six TEDx talks, and hosts the podcast Solutionary Voices. Her honors include the NCSS Spirit of America Award (2023) and induction into the Animal Rights Hall of Fame (2010).

In this episode, Zoe talks with Svenia Busson about:

• The Solutionary Framework — a four-phase method (identify, investigate, innovate, implement) for turning students into changemakers
• Why a "solutionary" isn't the same as a problem-solver — and the ethical test that makes the difference
• Parallels with the Design for Change movement and its "I Can" model for youth-led change
• How AI can help students map root causes and stakeholders — without replacing the thinking itself
• Why compassion, built through real contact, is a starting point solutionary work can't outsource to a chatbot
• AI as a "potential nemesis" — manipulation, algorithmic drift, and the slide from healthy skepticism into cynicism
• Turning her own framework on AI itself — who's harmed and who benefits from the technology
• Concrete student wins, from cafeteria reform to rewriting school disciplinary policy

Dr. Dhir Jhingran is the Founder and Executive Director of the Language and Learning Foundation (LLF), one of India's leading organizations working on foundational literacy and numeracy. Before founding LLF in 2015, he spent three decades in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), India's premier civil service, including senior policy roles in the Ministry of Education, before taking voluntary retirement to dedicate himself fully to education.

Under his leadership, LLF has grown to roughly 300 people working inside seven-plus Indian state government systems — not running standalone pilot programs, but co-designing curriculum, teacher training, and assessment directly with governments at the scale the crisis demands. LLF's stated goal is to reach 60 million children cumulatively by 2030. Jhingran has also served as Senior Advisor to UNICEF India, advisor to Nepal's Ministry of Education, and Asia Regional Director at Room to Read, and sits on India's National Steering Committee for the development of National Curriculum Frameworks.

In this episode, Dhir talks with Svenia Busson about:

• His path from three decades inside the IAS to founding LLF — and the moment he realized foundational learning was worth building the rest of his career around
• India's learning crisis in numbers — more than half of 10-year-olds cannot read a simple text with comprehension
• "Raising the floor" versus raising the average — why the 15-20% of children learning almost nothing in every classroom get hidden by national statistics
• Mother-tongue instruction and India's linguistic reality — why comprehension collapses when children are taught in a language they don't speak at home
• Co-creating with government instead of building parallel programs — LLF's model for scaling reform inside state systems without taking credit
• Where AI can genuinely help foundational learning, and where the hype gets ahead of the classroom reality for first-generation learners
• The non-negotiable skills named in India's National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 — critical thinking, learning to learn, and socio-emotional development
• His advice to EdTech founders building AI tools for children aged four to ten

Julia Freeland Fisher is Director of Education Research at the Clayton Christensen Institute, the nonpartisan think tank built on Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation, where she has spent 13 years making the case that who students know matters as much as what they know. She holds a BA from Princeton and a JD from Yale Law School — a credential she cheerfully calls "a very expensive detour," having decided along the way that she did not want to be a lawyer.

She began her career in 2007 at NewSchools Venture Fund, at the height of the No Child Left Behind era, when American education reform was measured almost entirely in test scores and graduation rates. Looking at the world of work, she noticed that networks quietly determined who got jobs, internships and promotions — and that this was completely absent from the reform conversation. She joined the Christensen Institute in 2013 to incubate the idea nobody was funding: social capital as a measurable, buildable education outcome. She is the author of Who You Know: Unlocking Innovations That Expand Students' Networks (Wiley), co-written with her husband Daniel Fisher, with a foreword by Clayton Christensen.

Today her work sits at the intersection of social capital and AI. She writes Connection Error on Substack, on how AI is changing our relationships and how our relationships are changing AI. Her latest report, Prosocial Possibilities: Building Tech That Builds Students' Connections (with Anna Arsenault, published August 2026), documents a project with 10 ed tech platforms testing prosocial features and functionalities in the college and career guidance space. She is also running an early-stage Jobs to Be Done study with Bob Moesta on what actually drives demand for AI companionship among 18–24 year olds.

In this episode, Julia talks with Svenia Busson about:

• Why relationships are the thing everyone in education agrees about and no one is accountable for — no budget line, no outcome metric, nobody's job
• AI companions as a textbook case of disruptive innovation — the risk comes less from the technology than from how flagrantly we've neglected human connection
• What prosocial AI looks like in practice — Protopia, Road Trip Nation, Climb Together and Uprooted Academy
• The four "jobs to be done" behind AI companionship in her study with Bob Moesta — and why not one young person used the word "loneliness"
• Fear of burdening others as the most potent force pushing teens toward chatbots, both pushing and pulling
• Why measurement alone won't save human connection — "what gets valued gets measured gets done" — and where the Search Institute's Developmental Relationships Framework and Harvard's relationship mapping fit in
• The 75+ US state bills regulating AI companionship, warning labels that miss the point, and federal cuts to outdoor education as two sides of the same coin
• Help-seeking and networking as the most neglected "skill of the future" — the Connected Scholars curriculum tripled graduation rates, and no employer ever asks for it

The AI conversation education is missing: relationships are the real disruption.

• Julia Freeland Fisher at the Clayton Christensen Institute: https://www.christenseninstitute.org/people/julia-freeland-fisher/
• Prosocial Possibilities (Julia Freeland Fisher & Anna Arsenault, Aug 2026): https://www.christenseninstitute.org/publication/prosocial-possibilities/
• Connection Error, Julia's Substack: https://juliafreelandfisher.substack.com/
• Who You Know: Unlocking Innovations That Expand Students' Networks: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/37862640
• Navigation & Guidance in the Age of AI: 5 Trends to Watch: https://www.christenseninstitute.org/publication/navigation-guidance-ai/
• NewSchools Venture Fund: https://www.newschools.org/
• Protopia: https://protopia.co/
• Road Trip Nation: https://roadtripnation.com/
• Climb Together: https://www.climbtogether.org/
• Uprooted Academy: https://www.uprootedacademy.org/
• Search Institute — Developmental Relationships Framework: https://searchinstitute.org/resources-hub/developmental-relationships-framework
• Making Caring Common (Harvard GSE) — Relationship Mapping Strategy: https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/resources-for-educators/relationship-mapping-strategy
• Connected Scholars (Jean Rhodes, UMass Boston): https://mentoringcentral.net/mentoring-training/connectedscholars/
• The Rithm Project — Youth, AI, and the Relationships That Shape Them: https://www.therithmproject.org/
• Common Sense Media research on teens and AI: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research
• Foundation for Social Connection (Julianne Holt-Lunstad): https://www.social-connection.org/
• Jobs to Be Done theory (Bob Moesta's framework): https://www.christenseninstitute.org/theory/jobs-to-be-done/

Laura Zimmermann, Ph.D., is the Director of Youth AI Research at Common Sense Media, where she leads research within the newly launched Youth AI Safety Institute — the first independent safety lab dedicated to testing how AI products affect children. She earned her Ph.D. in Psychology at Georgetown University with a concentration in Human Development and Public Policy, and was an Institute of Education Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Education.

For over a decade, Laura has studied how children learn from screens — starting in infancy and early childhood and working her way up to tweens and teens. Her graduate research at Georgetown, in collaboration with Binghamton University, tested whether the well-documented "transfer deficit" (young children learn less from a 2D screen than from a live person) also applied to the then-brand-new iPad. It did. Her landmark paper, The Ghost in the Touchscreen: Social Scaffolds Promote Learning by Toddlers (Child Development, 2017), showed what closes that gap: a responsive human sitting next to the child. She is also a co-author of Developer Meets Developmentalist: Improving Industry–Research Partnerships in Children's Technology (Journal of Children and Media, 2018).

Across her career she has led research for PBS KIDS, Sesame Workshop, New America, the Aspen Institute, the Bay Area Discovery Museum, Google, and MIND Education. She credits two mentors in particular: Lisa Guernsey at New America, and Donna Mitroff — the educational consultant behind Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. At Common Sense Media she is a lead author of Teens in the AI Era: Schoolwork and Skills That Matter, a nationally representative survey of over 1,000 US teens aged 13–17, fielded with NORC at the University of Chicago.

In this episode, Laura talks with Svenia Busson about:

• The transfer deficit — why toddlers learn less from a touchscreen than from a person, and the one thing that closes the gap
• Why 70% of teens now use AI for schoolwork, but only a minority have ever discussed with a teacher what AI actually is
• The 63% who get answers from AI — and the 77% of that same group using it for brainstorming, feedback and checking work instead
• The nearly 90% of US teachers who have received no AI professional development, and what that vacuum produces
• Why 44% of teens have had an AI tool blocked at school — and 59% of them simply switched to a personal device
• The 38% who say AI makes them generate fewer of their own ideas, and keep using it anyway — grind culture as a hypothesis
• AI companions: 72% of teens have used one, and why Common Sense Media's position is that under-18s shouldn't use them at all
• The sycophancy problem — why "practising" social skills with a character that always agrees with you isn't practice
• The equity question nobody has data on yet: does AI narrow or widen the gap between well-resourced and under-resourced students
• The developer/developmentalist gap — what it would take for child development evidence to shape a product before launch rather than after the scandal

The most powerful intervention isn't a policy or a filter — it's a conversation without judgment.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Teens in the AI Era: Schoolwork and Skills That Matter — Common Sense Media
• Talk, Trust, and Trade-Offs: How and Why Teens Use AI Companions — Common Sense Media
• Youth AI Safety Institute and its free AI Risk Assessments of tools kids actually use
• Digital Literacy & Well-Being Curriculum, Grades 9–12 — free AI literacy lessons for teachers
• The Ghost in the Touchscreen: Social Scaffolds Promote Learning by Toddlers — Child Development, 2017
• Laura Zimmermann's research
• The Disengaged Teen — Jenny Anderson's episode, referenced on teen shame around AI use

Mentioned in this episode:

For those who wish to know more about the Education Futures fellowship: https://educationfutures.ai/fellowship

John Roberts is the Chief Executive of Oak National Academy, an NGO publicly funded by England's Department for Education to build a free, fully digitised national curriculum for England's schools. A former secondary school teacher and senior leader in the North West of England, he built his first reputation outside the classroom by founding Edapt in 2011, an independent edu-legal support service for teachers and school staff, where he remains chair.

In April 2020, as COVID closed schools overnight, Roberts helped launch Oak as an emergency remote-learning platform — going from a WhatsApp conversation to a live site in 12 days, delivering over 130 million lessons between April 2020 and July 2021. He joined initially as Director of Product and Engineering before becoming CEO. Under his leadership, Oak evolved into what he calls the world's first fully digitised, machine-readable national curriculum: 13,000 lessons and roughly 100,000 resources across all 17 National Curriculum subjects, now used by one in three teachers in England. In September 2024, Oak launched Aila, England's first publicly available generative AI tool, now used by more than 60,000 teachers to plan lessons grounded in Oak's own openly licensed curriculum data.

In this episode, John talks with Svenia Busson about:

• Why Oak scaled from a pandemic emergency platform into England's official digitised curriculum
• The case for openly licensing school content under the UNESCO 2019 Recommendation on OER
• Building Aila — and the safety and quality failures (Americanisms, guessable multiple-choice distractors, chatbot risk around sensitive texts like Romeo and Juliet) that shaped its design
• Why grounding AI in a rich curriculum corpus, including full lesson transcripts, beats one-shot lesson generation
• Cognitive outsourcing vs. cognitive offloading — keeping teachers in the loop on lesson planning
• What Oak's open misconception datasets and curriculum knowledge graph (published on GitHub) enable for other builders, and how they compare to efforts like Eedi's misconceptions research with Google DeepMind
• Why public digital infrastructure, not just AI models, is the missing layer in ed-tech — from the US's philanthropically funded Learning Commons to Anthropic's MCP standard
• Open questions ahead: faster evaluation methods, the pending NFER/EEF evaluation of Aila, and England's 2028 curriculum change

Find out more about knowledge graphs: https://www.tes.com/magazine/analysis/general/why-ai-gets-lesson-planning-wrong-and-how-fix-it

Find out about AILA latest research results: Does using Aila, an AI lesson-planning assistant, reduce the time teachers spend planning lessons? Study done by the Education Endowment Foundation: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/projects-and-evaluation/projects/aila-teacher-choices-trial

Mentioned in this episode:

Education Futures Fellowship

A six-week programme starting on September 22nd, where seven world-leading experts in developmental psychology, neuroscience, and AI child safety will share everything they know with you: educationfutures.ai/fellowship.

Dr. Maria Mercedes "Didith" T. Rodrigo is a Professor in the Department of Information Systems and Computer Science at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, where she directs the Ateneo Laboratory for the Learning Sciences (ALLS) and co-heads the Ateneo Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality Laboratory. For over two decades she has studied what students actually do and feel while learning with technology — detecting boredom, confusion, frustration and engaged concentration from interaction data inside intelligent tutoring systems, educational games and programming environments.

She is a former President of the Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education (APSCE) and a recipient of its Distinguished Researcher Award, and sits on the Executive Committee of the International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society. Her opinion piece "Is the AIED Conundrum a First-World Problem?" (International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education) argued that the classrooms most likely to benefit from AI are the ones structurally least able to deploy it. In July 2025 she delivered the keynote "The Technopolitics of AIED: A Developing Country's Perspective" at the AIED conference in Palermo, and later that year argued for culturally-responsive AI at the K-EDU EXPO in Korea.

In this episode, Didith talks with Svenia Busson about:

• Why AI in education is built on Western psychological constructs — and whether boredom in Manila is the same as boredom in Michigan
• The Scooter experiment: US students deliberately provoking a scolding animated dog, Filipino students insisting "Scooter cares about me"
• "Gaming the system" — why students in the Philippines pretend to work rather than walk out, and what generative AI does to that instinct
• Findings from WHIMC, the University of Illinois Minecraft science environment, where lower-performing Filipino students made almost no observations — the cost of saving face
• Testing LLM grading bias on Filipino English, after earlier work showing essays written in African American English scored lower
• AI Ed Unplugged — Seiji Isotani and Ig Ibert Bittencourt's Brazilian movement to design AI for classrooms with one device, one connection, and paper exams
• Why she'd give the scarce resources to the teacher first — including the maths teacher assigned to teach relaxation massage
• Epistemic vigilance as the successor to critical thinking, and why friction, confusion and struggle have to be designed back in
• The trade-offs a Global South education minister actually faces — including feeding programmes, because hungry children cannot learn

Mentioned in this episode:

For those who wish to know more about the Education Futures fellowship: https://educationfutures.ai/fellowship

Zia Akhter Abbas is President & CEO of The Citizens Foundation (TCF), one of the world's largest privately-run networks of formal schools for low-income children and the largest private employer of women in Pakistan. He came to education sideways: an IB diploma at Lester B. Pearson United World College in Canada, an MBA from LUMS, then seventeen years in senior business and risk roles at Citi and Standard Chartered, plus a board seat at 1Link, Pakistan's leading payments switch. He left banking for TCF in 2014.

For a decade he led TCF's global resource mobilisation, working with a volunteer movement across 14 countries, building the organisation's global governance framework, stewarding its Government Partnership Schools network (400+ public schools now run by TCF), and driving TCF's Strategy 2030. He became President & CEO in June 2025.

The organisation he now runs began in 1995 with six friends in Karachi who met every Wednesday, decided education was the closest thing to a root cause, and built five schools with their own money. Today TCF operates 2,261 school units across 60+ districts, educates roughly 300,000 students, employs ~24,000 people including 15,000+ female faculty, runs its own construction company that completes two to three schools a week, and moves teachers 75,000 kilometres a day in a fleet of nearly 1,000 vans. Its results: 55% of TCF students complete intermediate (vs 27% nationally) and 26% enter university (vs 12% nationally). Zia is a Schwab Foundation / World Economic Forum social entrepreneur and a board member of the Global Schools Forum.

In this episode, Zia talks with Svenia Busson about:

• Leaving banking for education after seventeen years — and why the nonprofit job turned out to be harder
• How TCF scaled from five schools to 2,261 units using the "unit concept," a cookie-cutter template for an entire school system — and what a sacred template costs you
• Pakistan's 25 million out-of-school children — a population the size of Australia — and why the state stopped building schools decades ago
• Funding 300,000 students with no government money: $60M+ last year from diaspora volunteers, chapters in 14 countries, institutional funders, and zakat acting as a global community endowment
• The all-female faculty decision, made intuitively rather than from research — and the finding that girls' enrolment drops 15% for every 500 metres of walking distance
• What broke when EdTech built for paying markets met dust, theft-prone tablet racks and 24-hour power cuts — and why TCF may have to build its own tools
• The Khan Academy Pakistan / Khanmigo pilot for Grades 6–8 maths and science, why it went teacher-facing rather than student-facing, and what principals said when asked if they'd ever use AI
• Why AI literacy training was rolled out before any AI tools — and why you educate 24,000 people rather than police them
• The Global South inversion: why the biggest unlock may be language, not tutoring, in a country where everything meaningful requires English
• Why the acute Western harms — mental health, isolation — look different when eight people share a room and the phone belongs to your father

Mentioned in this episode:

For those who wish to know more about the Education Futures fellowship: https://educationfutures.ai/fellowship

Dr. Obiageli "Oby" Ezekwesili is Founder and President of Human Capital Africa, an accountability and advocacy organization devoted to Africa's foundational learning crisis — getting every child reading, writing and counting by age 10. An economic policy expert and chartered accountant by training, she was a co-founder of Transparency International and later served in the Nigerian government as Minister of Solid Minerals and then as Federal Minister of Education. She led the public procurement reform agenda that earned her the nickname "Madam Due Process."

She went on to serve as Vice President for the Africa Region at the World Bank, overseeing operations across 48 sub-Saharan countries. She co-founded the #BringBackOurGirls movement, ran for President of Nigeria in the 2019 elections, and founded the School of Politics, Policy and Governance (SPPG), an unconventional school now operating in Nigeria, Senegal and Kenya, with Ghana opening this year, whose graduates are already running for and winning public office. She also advises Club de Madrid, the forum of former democratic heads of state and government democracies and economic development including on AI regulation and governance.

In this episode, Oby talks with Svenia Busson about:

• Human dignity as the through-line of a career spanning Transparency International, two ministries and the World Bank — and why she now calls education "a living thing"
• Africa's demographic pivot — average age 18.9 years, and 85% of global workforce growth by 2050 — and why it leads to either a dividend or a disaster
• Why she stopped "wasting her voice on incorrigible leaders" and built a school to manufacture better ones instead, refusing national accreditation to escape captured systems
• The foundational learning crisis as a matter of life and death — nine in ten children in sub-Saharan Africa unable to read a simple sentence by age 10, and why she refuses to call a spade an agricultural implement
• What actually causes it: no early-childhood preparation, teaching in languages children don't speak, curricular overload, untrained and uncoached teachers, and ministries with no learning data
• What works and has been proven at scale — structured pedagogy, teaching at the right level, teacher coaching, and the question she puts to presidents: "Mr President, what did our children learn today?"
• Sobral in Brazil and India's NIPUN Bharat — a 20% improvement in learning outcomes in four to five years — as evidence that political will, not technical solutions, is the binding constraint
• Why the mobile telephony leapfrog (Nigeria: 500,000 landlines in 50 years, 200 million mobile lines after liberalisation) is the right mental model for AI in Africa
• The agency divide, not the digital divide — a child can have the most advanced AI system and still lack the knowledge and capability to use it purposefully and critically
• Data sovereignty, AI sweatshops on the continent, and why AI must free teachers for individualised attention and values — never replace them

Her three game changers for Africa: young people, African women, and technology as their enabler.

Mentioned in this episode:

For those who wish to know more about the Education Futures fellowship: https://educationfutures.ai/fellowship

Dr. John Mugo is the Chief Executive Officer of Mizizi Elimu Afrika, the African-led education organization based in Nairobi, Kenya, formerly known as Zizi Afrique Foundation. He holds a Doctorate and a Master's degree in Special Needs Education from the University of Hanover, Germany, and a Bachelor of Education (Music) from Kenyatta University, where he went on to chair the Department of Special Needs Education.

Before founding the organization in 2018, he headed Uwezo, one of East Africa's largest citizen-led learning assessment initiatives, measuring what children actually know rather than what systems claim to teach. He leads ALiVE (Action for Life Skills and Values in East Africa), a regional framework and assessment system that has now assessed life skills and values in over 45,000 adolescents across Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, and works directly with the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development on values-based education and teacher training reform.

In March 2026, Zizi Afrique rebranded as Mizizi Elimu Afrika — "mizizi" is Kiswahili for "many roots" — and launched Vision 2040: Strong Foundations for Lasting Change, a 15-year strategy to reach more than 10 million children across 10+ African countries with stronger foundational learning. His organization currently works across Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Malawi and Cameroon, and is piloting AI-supported teaching with Fab AI and Gemini in 15 Kenyan schools.

In this episode, John talks with Svenia Busson about:

• Why fewer than 20% of children in much of Sub-Saharan Africa are learning at grade level — and why he calls that an "80 to 90% leakage" no amount of university investment can fix
• Vision 2040 and the two-lever theory behind it: strengthening government systems instead of building parallel NGO programmes, and forcing a competitive civil society sector to collaborate
• Why Africa's real AI problem isn't models but data — 800+ languages, oral cultures, and knowledge trapped in unpublished grey literature
• The case for voice data and mother-tongue AI as the fastest route to reading — drawn from his own experience learning to read in Kikuyu, not English
• What the Fab AI and Gemini pilot in 15 schools is showing about real-time assessment — and the widening gap between connected private schools and public schools without electricity
• The whole-school approach to values built with Kenya's curriculum institute and piloted in 79 schools — because responsibility and integrity can't be taught in a lesson slot
• Why place value in Grade 1 explains Kenya's KCSE maths results, and the 10-year roadmap to move Grade 3 numeracy proficiency from 30% to 75%
• His blunt advice to ministries drafting AI policy: stop banning it, start investing in your own data, and put young people in the driver's seat
• Why Africa's median age of 19 is an asset rather than a fiscal crisis — and what has to be true for that to hold

Links: Mizizi Elimu Afrika · ALiVE · Uwezo · Fab AI · AI for Education · KICD · John Mugo on LinkedIn

Mentioned in this episode:

For those who wish to know more about the Education Futures fellowship: https://educationfutures.ai/fellowship