Is Africa's AI education revolution being built on someone else's terms or its own?

In this episode of Discourse Brief, we sit down with Professor Karen Ferreira-Meyers of the University of Eswatini's Institute of Distance Education at eLearning Africa 2026. She's spent over two decades building distance-learning infrastructure across Southern Africa; work that meant her institute was ready for COVID-19 fifteen years before it happened, while other universities scrambled for months.

”People want too much too fast”; that's how Professor Karen Ferreira-Meyers sums up one of the biggest obstacles to real learning and growth.

In this episode:

• Why connectivity and cost remain the biggest barrier to online education in Southern Africa
• What Prof. Ferreira-Meyers learned building Moodle-based distance learning systems, and why interaction matters more than the platform itself
• Why AI is ”a two-edged sword” capable of flattening language, thinking and culture into sameness, or freeing creative people to do more of it
• The single biggest misconception educators bring into her six-week AI-integration course, and where most of them land by the end
• What South Africa's homegrown AI language tool says about building technology on ”Africa's terms”
• Why she believes the most urgent education policy today is closing the access gap that AI risks widening
• Her case for patience in growth and learning: ”We didn't go to the moon in one go. It took us several steps.”

Discourse Brief is Africa Discourse Channel's interview series, putting Africa's builders, policymakers, and thinkers on the spot. New episodes of Discourse Brief drop regularly on Wavve Radio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one.#DiscourceBrief #EdTechAfrica #AIinEducation