Samuel Ansah

George Boateng, Evans Atompoya, Philemon Badu et al.

Sub-Saharan Africa faces persistently high student-teacher ratios and shortages of qualified teachers, limiting students' access to personalized learning support and formative assessment. To address this challenge, we present Adesua, a WhatsApp-based AI Teaching Assistant for science education that extends the Kwame for Science platform. Adesua leverages WhatsApp's widespread adoption in Africa to provide accessible, curriculum-aligned learning support for Junior High School (JHS) and Senior High School (SHS) students across West Africa. The system integrates curated textbooks and 33 years of national examination questions with generative AI to enable conversational question answering and automated assessment with feedback via a WhatsApp bot. Students can ask science questions, take timed or untimed multiple-choice tests by topic or exam year, and receive instant grading and detailed explanations of correct and incorrect responses. A 6-month feasibility deployment in 2025 had 56 active users in Ghana, including students and parents. Quantitative evaluation showed a high perceived usefulness, with a helpfulness score of 93.75\% for AI-generated answers, albeit with a small number of ratings (n=16). These preliminary results provide a basis for more extensive future evaluation of a WhatsApp-based AI assistant to assess its potential to offer scalable, low-cost personalized learning support and formative assessment in resource-constrained educational contexts.

George Boateng, Philemon Badu, Patrick Agyeman-Budu et al.

Recent advances in generative AI have shown their potential to be leveraged for legal education. Yet, work on the development and deployment of such systems for legal education in the Global South is limited. In this work, we developed Eskwai for Students, a generative AI assistant to help law students with their legal education. Eskwai for Students is a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) system that provides answers to a wide range of legal questions for law students grounded in a curated database of over 12K case laws and 1.4K legislation in Ghana. We deployed Eskwai for Students in a longitudinal study of 30 months (2.5 years) used by 3.1K law students in Ghana who made 32K queries. We evaluated the helpfulness of our AI, and provided insight into the kinds of queries law students submit to this generative AI tool, which raises some ethical concerns. This work contributes to an understanding of how law students in the Global South are using generative AI for their studies and the ways it could be leveraged responsibly to advance legal education.