Towards an Ethical AI Curriculum: A Pan-African, Culturally Contextualized Framework for Primary and Secondary Education

AI education must be culturally contextualized, not imported wholesale: The paper argues that African schools should not "uncritically import curricula designed for other linguistic, cultural, and socio-political contexts," emphasizing that over 60% of Africa's population is under 25 and needs AI preparation tailored to African realities, values, and labor markets.

Ubuntu philosophy offers an alternative ethical framework for AI: The research explicitly maps global AI-ethics principles to "Ubuntu-informed relational ethics," suggesting that African approaches to AI governance should be grounded in indigenous philosophical traditions emphasizing community, interconnectedness, and collective responsibility rather than solely Western individualistic frameworks.

A comprehensive framework requires six principles, four curriculum domains, and five ethical competencies: Rather than ad-hoc AI training, the paper proposes a structured, age-appropriate progression from lower primary through upper secondary education, indicating that ethical AI literacy should be systematically integrated across the entire educational pipeline.

Continental policy momentum creates an opportunity for coordinated action: The African Union's Continental AI Strategy (2024) and the 2025 Africa Declaration on AI have elevated AI education to the continental agenda, suggesting this is a critical moment for African nations to shape their own AI curricula rather than adopting external models.

Implementation will be validated across linguistic and national contexts: The planned empirical validation includes a Delphi study, teacher surveys across anglophone, francophone, lusophone, and arabophone regions, and multi-country classroom piloting, indicating the framework is designed for practical, evidence-based deployment across Africa's diverse educational systems.