Towards an Ethical AI Curriculum: A Pan-African, Culturally Contextualized Framework for Primary and Secondary Education

TL;DR

This paper proposes a culturally contextualized, ethically grounded AI curriculum framework for African primary and secondary education, emphasizing local values, policy analysis, and empirical validation to promote social justice and innovation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel African-centric AI education framework with guiding principles, curriculum domains, ethical competencies, and a validation plan, tailored to local contexts and values.

Findings

Developed a six-principle AI curriculum framework for Africa.

Mapped global AI ethics to Ubuntu-informed relational ethics.

Outlined a multi-phase empirical validation plan involving teachers and classrooms.

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now embedded in educational, civic, and economic systems worldwide. For African primary and secondary education, this creates a double imperative: to prepare a young population (over sixty per cent of Africans are under twenty-five) for AI-mediated labour markets without uncritically importing curricula designed for other linguistic, cultural, and socio-political contexts. The African Union's Continental AI Strategy (2024) and the 2025 Africa Declaration on AI have elevated these questions to the continental agenda. This paper proposes a Pan-African, culturally contextualised, and ethically grounded framework for integrating AI education into African primary and secondary schools. The paper is a structured conceptual synthesis of continental and national policy documents, peer-reviewed scholarship on AI ethics, AI literacy, decolonial pedagogy, and Ubuntu-grounded AI governance. We contribute: (i) a framework of six guiding principles, four curriculum domains, five ethical competencies, and an age-banded progression from lower primary to upper secondary; (ii) a comparative analysis of continental and national policy contexts; (iii) an explicit mapping between global AI-ethics principles and Ubuntu-informed relational ethics; (iv) a planned empirical validation programme combining a Delphi study, teacher surveys across anglophone, francophone, lusophone, and arabophone contexts, and multi-country classroom piloting; and (v) targeted recommendations for policymakers, educators, civil society, and international partners. We argue that an ethical AI curriculum can serve as a transformative tool for equity, innovation, and social justice, and outline a research agenda to embed ethics, resilience, and critical thinking at the core of Africa's digital future.