UNESCO programme puts women's leadership at the centre of AI capacity-building in the Global South

UNESCO's International Centre for Higher Education Innovation (ICHEI), working with UNESCO's Institute for Information Technologies in Education, launched "AI-Enabled Empowerment: Women's Leadership in Higher Education in the Global South" on 10 September in Paris. The programme runs on three strands — AI capacity-building, women's leadership, and cross-regional knowledge exchange — and builds directly on a predecessor initiative, Women Leading Change in Africa, launched in 2024. Participating institutions span Cote d'Ivoire, Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia and Zambia in Africa, join Southeast Asian counterparts through SEAMEO, and reach into Central Asia via Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Nepal. The design choice worth noting is the pairing: AI adoption in higher education is usually discussed as a technical or policy question, but this programme treats who leads that adoption as inseparable from how well it goes, and builds the leadership pipeline and the technical capacity in the same track rather than sequencing one after the other.

This is a QeRN summary by Ahmed Qerni. Read the original at UNESCO-ICHEI: https://en.ichei.org/en/news/activity/4292.html.