Ghana is confidently stepping into the artificial intelligence era.
Last week, Ghana announced an agreement with Intel Corporation, Coral Reef and the Ministry of Education to expand the AI for Youth programme and introduce responsible artificial intelligence teaching and learning into K–12 classrooms.
There is much to welcome and this initiative is promising.
AI can personalise learning, support children who are challenged, stimulate creativity and prepare young people for a labour market increasingly shaped by technology.
The question we should be asking, however, is this: Are we sufficiently prepared to protect our children from engaging on the internet?
This issue becomes even more important when we consider the wider environment in which Ghanaian children are growing.
Between January and July this year, Ghana recorded 53,415 adolescent pregnancies at health facilities, including 1,501 involving girls aged 10–14.
The majority were among girls aged 15–19, with about 7,000 pregnancies recorded each month in this older adolescent group.
These figures remind us that adolescents need more than information.
They need guidance, protection, healthy relationships, critical thinking and adults who understand the world they are navigating.
Truth is that the world has become digital too.
There have already been calls in Ghana for stronger restrictions on children’s access to social media.
At the same time, countries that moved earlier and more aggressively into children’s digital lives are reassessing how technology should be used.
Sweden, for example, is investing more in textbooks and reading and reducing reliance on screens in schools.
This is not a rejection of technology. It is a recognition that more technology does not automatically mean better education.
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Ghana should learn from this before moving from tablets already introduced to AI.
Our experience with the SHS tablets is instructive. Government guidelines make provision for supervision and filtering of inappropriate websites.
Yet, last week, parents at Adidome called for stronger configuration of the tablets after reporting concerns about students accessing adult content.
The lesson is simple: a safeguard written in a policy document is not necessarily a safeguard working in a child’s hands.
AI raises the stakes further.
Children may encounter misinformation, inappropriate content, manipulation, privacy violations, deepfakes and AI-generated sexual material.
They may even turn to chatbots for advice or emotional support.
This is why we must build strong guardrails before we widen access to AI among children.
Through research and meaningful engagement with educators, parents, children, technology experts, child-protection agencies and other relevant stakeholders, Ghana should develop clear, practical and enforceable national standards for age-appropriate AI use in schools.
These standards should address content filtering, data privacy, monitoring and reporting systems, and accountability.
Teachers must be adequately trained before being expected to supervise AI use, while parents should be given digital-safety education to support children beyond the classroom.
Ghana needs a well-funded National School Digital Safety and AI Unit, located within the ministry responsible for communications and digital technology.
Its role should include auditing the minimum digital-safety standards, certifying educational technology, monitoring emerging risks, investigating failures and publishing regular assessments of the impact of technology on children’s learning and wellbeing.
Ghana already has a National Child Online Protection Framework.
The challenge is to ensure that policies are adequately resourced, implemented and enforced.
Our children deserve the opportunities AI offers. But they also deserve books, play, physical activity, friendships, conversation and teachers.
The question is not whether Ghana should embrace AI.
The question is whether we will learn from those who went before us and build the safeguards before, rather than after, our children pay the price.
So I ask: will Ghana learn?
The writer is a Child development expert/Fellow of the Zero-To-Three Academy, USA.
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