Millions of young people around the world are increasingly relying on AI chatbots to acquire knowledge and even complete challenges as part of their learning.
And it uses the very technology that we believe is causing this issue to fix it.
Above all, Education, a Qatar-based nonprofit, is not equipped to understand the linguistic and ethnic nuances of English-speaking countries, as the majority of the world's popular AI chatbots are created in Silicon Valley, and believes it will create educational inequality on a global scale. However, the team sees AI as a way to tackle this issue.
In January 2025, the charity collaborated with MIT, Harvard and the United Nations Development Program to introduce a free, open source AI literacy program called Digi-Wise. Provided in collaboration with educators in developing countries, children are encouraging them to find misinformation about AI fuel, use AI tools responsibly in the classroom and develop their own AI tools from scratch.
As part of this, the charity has developed its own generation AI chatbot called Ferby. This allows users to access and personalize educational resources from the Internet-Free Educational Resource Bank, an online library that contains hundreds of free and open-source learning materials.
Education is more than anything else, it says it is already being used by over 5 million Indian children to work with the Indian nonprofit Mantra4change to access “project-based learning.” Recently, education has led to Ferby being embedded in the Edtech platform SwiftChat. This is used by 124 million students and Indian teachers.
“Ferby curates, customizes and creates learning materials to suit local realities, so rural Malawi teachers can perform appropriate science experiments just as easily as teachers in downtown Doha.” “By marrying offline ingenuity and the convenience of AI, we learn locally, low resources, and always within reach, but on a massive scale.”
Above all, education is one of the groups of organizations that use AI to tackle global inequality and work towards realizing the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Created in 2015, the UN SDGS consists of 17 social, economic and environmental targets that serve as guidelines for nations, businesses and individuals to follow to achieve a more peaceful and prosperous world. Above all, education is more than a project than a SDG 4: Inclusive and equitable education.
Global effort
Various other organizations are using AI to augment and enhance educational programming.
Tech To The Rescue is a global nonprofit organization that achieves its goal of connecting charities with pro bono software development teams, and is another organization supporting the UN SDGS. Last year, we launched a three-year AI-for-Good Accelerator program to help NGOs use AI to meet various UN SDGs.
One organization that will benefit from the program is Mercy Corps, a humanitarian group that works across more than 40 countries to tackle crises such as poverty, the climate crisis, natural disasters and violence. Through Accelerator, we have created AI strategy tools that will help first responders predict disasters and coordinate resources. World Institute on Disability AI has also joined the Accelerator program and created a resource matching system that helps organizations allocate support to people with disabilities in hours rather than weeks.
Similarly, the UN's digital technology agency and one of its oldest weapons, the International Telecommunication Union, helps organizations to achieve the UN SDG through a superior innovation factory startup competition using technology. For example, Indian applicants (startups called Bioniks) have been able to regain the ability of teenagers to perform simple tasks such as writing and dressing using AI-driven prosthetics.
Issues to consider
AI proves to be a powerful tool for achieving the UN SDG, but comes with significant risks. Again, unconscious bias is a major flaw in the AI system, as AI models are primarily developed by American tech giants in an industry that is already constrained by gender and racial inequality.
To address this, Shetty said layered prompts for English users, human reviews of the underlying AI datasets, and the creation of Indigenous chatbots are most important to achieving education than all goals.
The AI model is also power-intensive and has little access to the population of developing countries. So, Shetty offers AI companies solutions through technology-rich methods such as SMS, providing offline capabilities to encourage users to access AI resources when their internet connection is slowed. Open source free charging subscriptions also help, she added.
AI as a source of goodness
Challenges aside, Shetty believes that AI can become a force especially around education in the coming years. She told BI: “We are truly energised by how the global education community utilizes AI in education. WhatsApp-based mathematics tutors reach grid off-grid learners. Algorithms that optimize teacher deployment in underage fields.
But Shetty is clear that AI should augment human educators rather than chase them away. And she said the technology should only be used if it can solve the challenges facing humans and add real value.
“Simply put,” she said.
