Late in October 2025, the Ghana Ministry of Education (MoE) announced an ambitious initiative: subject-specific, AI-powered mobile and web apps to support teachers and learners in senior high schools (SHSs).
The apps would be co-created with the Ghana Education Service (GES), the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NaCCA), the National Teaching Council (NTC), the National Schools Inspectorate Authority (NaSIA), and the Centre for National Distance Learning and Open Schooling (CENDLOS).
For the AI component, stakeholders would partner with Playlab AI, a U.S.-based ed-tech start-up.
After the announcement, some local AI startups took notice and called out the MoE for not consulting them to help with the development of this project.

What The Education Ministry Proposed
According to the MoE, the apps would be built “on Ghana’s own curriculum materials” — teacher manuals, learner resources, national values, gender-equality and inclusion frameworks.
They would target 68,000 teachers and over 1.4 million learners across Ghana’s SHSs.
As part of the rollout, the MoE would implement a four-phase testing process (technical accuracy, educational quality, user experience, and regional testing). Pilot sessions would be held in all 712 SHSs through weekly Professional Learning Community (PLC) sessions.
The MoE emphasised the apps “compliment, not replace” teacher expertise, and stressed that the project is “locally led, ethically grounded, teacher-focused”.
A nationwide training for facilitators was scheduled for October 2025.

Playlab AI’s Local Language Gap
While the public announcement frames the project as locally grounded, some local players assert that Playlab AI lacks meaningful expertise in lower-resource African languages (including Ghanaian languages).
The company would be relying heavily on Ghana’s educational materials.
But how they would attain rights to local language datasets has not been detailed
George Boateng, CEO of Kwame AI, a Ghanaian-born, US-headquartered AI startup, raised some red flags about the process.

“Is it that no Ghanaian AI/Edtech company was found competent enough to build these tools, or is there some other reason? Are they saying we aren’t capable of building simple AI apps like this ourselves?“, he wrote in a LinkedIn post.

Paul Azunre, a founder instrumental in building Khaya AI, an African AI language translator, told The Labari Journal that representatives from Playlab reached out about solving the local language translation problem.
“They emailed us saying they wanted to meet our engineering team so that we could tell them how they’re approaching the [language translation] problem,” he told the Journal in a DM on the X platform.

Mr Azunre and his team had not been formally contracted to work on the project.

He told Playlab there would be cost implications for the use of his company’s datasets and IP to help with the project. Mr Azure stated that he had not heard from them since that conversation.

“We are a business. They cannot have our intellectual property for free,” Mr Azunre added.

Larry Agbador, Deputy Executive Director of CENDLOS, in an email to The Labari Journal, commented that they have plans to engage with the local AI community.

“We would like to mention that an engagement is currently being planned with local tech and AI companies to drive collaborations and broader participation of indigenous innovators in future AI deployments.”

He stated that they would share details once those plans are finalised.

The Labari Journal directly emailed the Ministry of Education for a comment. We did not receive a response at the time of publication.

A Trend of Exclusion?
Ghana’s embrace of AI in education is commendable — the global challenge around teacher shortages, curriculum delivery, and digitally supported learning is real.
But in building AI in Ghana, the conversation of exclusion of local tech players comes to the forefront.
By including Playlab AI — a foreign player with limited local language capability — local startups would feel left out by their government in contributing to tech projects.
Mr Azunre from Khaya AI stated that they’ve been reaching out to the new government on building and offering expertise on local AI development.
“We’ve been trying to engage with various arms of the government since the beginning. We had the impression that maybe they’ll be different,” he said. He has not received any responses so far and says all attempts have been futile.

“It feels like we’ve been sold out by our leaders, and that’s what my impression is. I think anyone who’s paying attention will agree with me.”