Two new World Bank reports show AI tutoring delivers real gains in low- and middle-income countries — and spell out exactly what it costs to run one responsibly. Punjab just made India's largest classroom AI commitment yet, training 200,000 teachers. But a five-year policy gap in Malawi and East Africa's push to pool university resources show how uneven the follow-through can be.

A nine-month literacy programme in Ghana just posted reading gains equal to two years of normal schooling — using generative AI to scale culturally specific phonics content across languages. India is now betting its entire national AI-in-education roadmap on the same idea. Meanwhile, teachers in Washington State are quietly voting with their usage data, and Nigeria is training nearly 12,000 educators to catch up.

India is teaching AI from Class 3, but a third of its schools have no internet. A new benchmark from EDSAFE and Arizona State aims to catch unproven tools before they reach kids, Kwara State in Nigeria put 700 students and 130 teachers through hands-on AI training, and TikTok is now teaching AI literacy across three African countries. The throughline: the strongest tools are being built for the classrooms that actually exist, not the ones pilots assume.