  Across the African continent, students grapple with various educational
challenges, including limited access to essential resources such as computers,
internet connectivity, reliable electricity, and a shortage of qualified
teachers. Despite these challenges, recent advances in AI such as BERT, and
GPT-4 have demonstrated their potential for advancing education. Yet, these AI
tools tend to be deployed and evaluated predominantly within the context of
Western educational settings, with limited attention directed towards the
unique needs and challenges faced by students in Africa. In this chapter, we
discuss challenges with using AI to advance education across Africa. Then, we
describe our work developing and deploying AI in Education tools in Africa for
science and computing education: (1) SuaCode, an AI-powered app that enables
Africans to learn to code using their smartphones, (2) AutoGrad, an automated
grading, and feedback tool for graphical and interactive coding assignments,
(3) a tool for code plagiarism detection that shows visual evidence of
plagiarism, (4) Kwame, a bilingual AI teaching assistant for coding courses,
(5) Kwame for Science, a web-based AI teaching assistant that provides instant
answers to students' science questions and (6) Brilla AI, an AI contestant for
the National Science and Maths Quiz competition. Finally, we discuss potential
opportunities to leverage AI to advance education across Africa.
