  There is a lack of enough qualified teachers across Africa which hampers
efforts to provide adequate learning support such as educational question
answering (EQA) to students. An AI system that can enable students to ask
questions via text or voice and get instant answers will make high-quality
education accessible. Despite advances in the field of AI, there exists no
robust benchmark or challenge to enable building such an (EQA) AI within the
African context. Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz competition (NSMQ) is
the perfect competition to evaluate the potential of such an AI due to its wide
coverage of scientific fields, variety of question types, highly competitive
nature, and live, real-world format. The NSMQ is a Jeopardy-style annual live
quiz competition in which 3 teams of 2 students compete by answering questions
across biology, chemistry, physics, and math in 5 rounds over 5 progressive
stages until a winning team is crowned for that year. In this position paper,
we propose the NSMQ AI Grand Challenge, an AI Grand Challenge for Education
using Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz competition (NSMQ) as a case
study. Our proposed grand challenge is to "Build an AI to compete live in
Ghana's National Science and Maths Quiz (NSMQ) competition and win - performing
better than the best contestants in all rounds and stages of the competition."
We describe the competition, and key technical challenges to address along with
ideas from recent advances in machine learning that could be leveraged to solve
this challenge. This position paper is a first step towards conquering such a
challenge and importantly, making advances in AI for education in the African
context towards democratizing high-quality education across Africa.
