A programme funded by Google to teach advanced artificial intelligence at African universities has reached South Africa, where lecturers from five universities have begun training to deliver the courses to their own students.
The lecturers, from Stellenbosch University, the University of the Western Cape, the University of the Free State, the University of Venda and the University of Mpumalanga, took part in a five-day workshop at Stellenbosch’s Tygerberg campus this week, iAfrica reported. It is the first of four planned in South Africa under the AI Research Foundations programme, which has already held training in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya.
The initiative is backed by a US$4 million grant from Google.org, the company’s philanthropic arm, announced in November 2025. The money went to the FATE Foundation, a Nigerian non-profit, which is working with the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) to run the programme over three years. The aim is to bring the course into at least 30 universities across the four countries, ten of them in South Africa, and to reach more than 30,000 students by 2028.
Rather than teaching students directly, the programme trains lecturers, known as AI Champions, who then teach and supervise students at their own universities. “Instead of teaching students directly, we upskill the lecturers who already teach them,” the AIMS programme site explains. Universities nominate the lecturers who take part.
The curriculum was developed by Google DeepMind with teaching specialists at University College London, and adapted for African classrooms with input from AIMS. It goes well beyond basic AI literacy. Students learn how neural networks and transformers work, build and fine-tune their own language models, and study how to develop AI responsibly. UCL has also released a toolkit to help lecturers teach the material.
Ulrich Paquet, the programme’s lead, who heads AIMS South Africa and is a research scientist at Google DeepMind, said the goal was to train 30,000 students across the continent. Francesco Petruccione, director of South Africa’s National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences, urged researchers to use AI to improve the quality of their work rather than simply produce more of it. “We should use AI to do not more but better science,” he said.
At Stellenbosch, the Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation (CERI), known for its work on genomic surveillance during the Covid-19 pandemic, plans to help offer the curriculum across the university from 2027. Its director, Tulio de Oliveira, said advanced AI training was essential if African researchers are to use AI ethically and build models that address the continent’s own health and social challenges.
The programme arrives as universities across Africa try to close a gap in advanced AI skills. Most AI research and computing power is concentrated in North America, Europe and East Asia, and African researchers have long argued that the continent needs to train its own specialists rather than rely on tools built elsewhere. Courses that let students build models themselves, rather than only use them, are a step in that direction.
Students do not apply to the programme directly; places on the courses depend on their university taking part. But the core material is open to anyone. The AI Research Foundations courses are available free of charge on Google Skills, and the AIMS teaching materials are published under an open licence. For students in Africa and elsewhere who are preparing for a master’s or PhD in artificial intelligence or data science, completing them could be a useful way to build skills and show initiative before applying.
Sources: iAfrica, 12 November 2026; FATE Foundation, November 2025; Google, 17 March 2026; AIMS South Africa, AI Research Foundations for Higher Education; Eikestadnuus; UCL, August 2026. Checked on 14 November 2026.