What is the name of your organization?
Tanzania AI Community
What is the name of your solution?
Twiga
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
Leveraging AI to provide Tanzanian teachers with an intelligent assistant in WhatsApp
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
TZA
What type of organization is your solution team?
Nonprofit
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
The Twiga project addresses the challenge of overcrowded classrooms and lack of educational resources in public schools across Tanzania. The student-teacher ratio in public schools is approximately 40:1, with some rural and urban classrooms exceeding even this number. Unfortunately, this limits the quality of instruction and one-on-one engagement students receive. This issue is exacerbated by the shortage of learning materials. In many schools, teachers are forced to share a single textbook with dozens of students, making individualized teaching nearly impossible.
According to Tanzania’s Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, there are approximately 13 million children enrolled in primary and secondary schools. Unfortunately, access to quality education remains uneven, with significant dropout rates. For example, the transition rate from primary to lower secondary school remains low due to language barriers and insufficient learning support (only about 2 million of the 13 million are in secondary school). With only about 300,000 teachers for these students, educators feel overburdened.
Across SSA, many countries face similar conditions—high student-to-teacher ratios, lack of textbooks, and burned-out educators.
What is your solution?
Twiga is a WhatsApp-based educational chatbot designed to support Tanzanian teachers with instant, curriculum-aligned content and tools. Twiga uses open-source large language models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation, and knowledge graphs to provide localized educational support directly. We use WhatsApp, as it's a platform that's already widely used by teachers at work (communicating with colleagues, sharing notes, etc.) across Tanzania and other SSA countries.
We deliver content for teachers using the official textbooks from the Tanzania Institute of Education (TIE). By parsing and indexing this curriculum, we can generate contextualized exercises, explanations, and lesson support for their specific subject and grade level.
We are currently adding features to Twiga like complete exams generation and formatted lecture notes in PDF format, which teachers can easily share with colleagues or print to use in class. This reduces their workload but maintains the national education standards.
As a side note, we also aim for Twiga to offer a basic AI literacy onboarding to help teachers build confidence in understanding the value and risks of generative AI and technology in education.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Our solution serves primary and secondary school teachers in Tanzania’s public and private schools. Many of these educators are forced to rely on a single copy of a government-issued textbook, which may be outdated, lost, or lent to students.
Using Twiga, we provide teachers with universal access to curriculum content directly through WhatsApp, regardless of whether they have a textbook on hand. It allows them to generate contextualized exercises, lesson materials, and (soon) full exams in just a few seconds. This aims to reduce the prep time for classes and offer more variety in the materials teachers share with students.
In addition, Twiga introduces teachers to AI on a platform they're comfortable with. The goal is to gradually build AI literacy. Ultimately, we aim to expand Twiga’s reach across East Africa, including the Kenyan, Ugandan, and Rwandese curricula.