Generative AI for Literacy in Mali

Mali is a former French colony in West Africa with 65% illiteracy and extremely poor results in all levels of its educational system. This has been partly attributed to its colonial heritage where children are obligated to study in French despite the fact that French is not spoken in the home, its use largely restricted to the administrative domain. The vehicular language of Mali, Bambara, is spoken by about 80% of the population but efforts to transition to education in the language the people speak has been hampered by lack of curriculum materials and, generally, development of Bambara as a written, as opposed to oral, language. The project explores the use of generative AI to produce illustrated stories in Bambara for children rooted in Malian culture, along with supporting pedagogical material for students and lesson plans for teachers. While the project demonstrated that generative AI tools generate material with an extremely Global North-centric bias, human experts in the use of the tools with knowledge of Malian culture can use the tools with great productivity. In a matter of weeks, several times the total quantity of children’s literature available in Bambara that had existed before was generated. Field testing demonstrated remarkable success in interesting children that had never read in their native language to read, with a majority of children already acquainted with French phonetics learning to read Bambara accurately in a single story-based lesson and children who had not learned reading skills motivated and making significant progress due to the material being in their native language and lavishly illustrated. The approach, combined with an emphasis on native-language education, appears to be very promising for reducing the level of illiteracy and low-literacy in Mali.