Artificial Intelligence Update: MMW Partnership with the Oxford Internet Institute
MMW’s Global Director Mel Manning and Founder Sharon Bylenga were recently invited to Oxford University by Johanna Barop, a PhD candidate in Information, Communication and the Social Sciences at Oxford University in the UK. They participated in a “high table” dinner at Mansfield College and discussed the current digital literacy partnership between MMW and Oxford University that Johanna leads.
Johanna and Joseph Levine are researching “AfriGPT,” an abbreviated version of ChatGPT. The chat bot delivers unlimited chats with AI over SMS. Users can chat even if they do not have internet access, cannot afford data, or do not own a smartphone. AfriGPT is offered by the telecommunications company Africell in multiple African countries.
Africell is a longstanding partner of MMW-SL, and is especially supportive of our Digitruck project, a digital literacy project we launched last year with funding from the Internet Society Foundation and in partnership with Close The Gap. For the past several months, “AfriGPT” has been included in our Digitruck teaching curriculum. MMW is expanding our curriculum to include dedicated modules on AI literacy. The first digitruck programme connected with 300+ teenage girls and 30 female entrepreneurs to digital technology as a way to bridge the “digital divide.” MMW are looking forward to our second digitruck arriving in March 2026.
The MMW-Oxford collaboration investigates what happens when low-income, low-connectivity communities get simple, text-based access to frontier AI. Together we will investigate how digital literacy programs improve access to technologies, and how they affect AI use in last-mile-communities. Our study will isolate whether AI-generated tutoring and business advice measurably improve skills acquisition and micro-enterprise productivity. The result will provide early causal evidence on how lightweight AI delivery can affect education, business and work in digitally underserved Sub-Sahara African settings, guiding both policy and product design for inclusive AI rollouts.
MMW-SL monitoring and evaluation officer, Abibatu Kamara leads the research for MMW and works alongside Johanna, who holds an MPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford and a BA in Philosophy and Economics from the University of Bayreuth, Germany. Her PhD is funded by the Oxford Internet Institute’s Shirley Scholarship and the Foundation of German Business, and her research is supported by the AI@Work programme by Schmidt Sciences.
The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) has been at the forefront of exploring the human impact of emerging technologies for 25 years. As a multidisciplinary research and teaching department, we bring together scholars and students from diverse fields to examine the opportunities and challenges posed by transformative innovations such as artificial intelligence, large language models, machine learning, digital platforms, and autonomous agents. For more information, visit oii.ox.ac.uk.
Schmidt Sciences who recently awarded this Oxford university project is a nonprofit organization founded in 2024 by Eric and Wendy Schmidt that works to accelerate scientific knowledge and breakthroughs with the most promising, advanced tools to support a thriving planet. The organization prioritizes research in areas poised for impact including AI and advanced computing, astrophysics, biosciences, climate, and space—as well as supporting researchers in a variety of disciplines through its science systems program.