The Secretary-General of the Organisation of Southern Cooperation (OSC), Manssor Bin-Mussalam, has urged African education authorities to overhaul school curricula by shifting focus from problem-solving to problem-posing.

Bin-Mussalam made this appeal during an interview with The PUNCH in Abuja.

The OSC, founded in 2020 and headquartered in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, promotes South–South cooperation among countries of the Global South, spanning Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific.

Highlighting the limitations of existing models, Bin-Mussalam explained that “a curriculum that is focused on problem solving is bound to enter into crisis in the age of Artificial Intelligence.”

He added, “I propose that we move our education systems from problem solving to problem posing. In AI today, we’ve all played around with ChatGPT, I suppose, and you look at ChatGPT, and two people can ask for the same thing from ChatGPT, and they get very different results. One gets a relatively abysmal result, and another gets something that is actually quite good. Why? One knew how to problematize the issues so that the AI responded better.”

According to him, current artificial intelligence systems are riddled with biases and often fail to reflect the realities of many societies. He noted, “AI data is biased; hence artificial intelligence today is excellent at translating automatically between French and English languages. But to translate into any of our languages, it becomes abysmal, because it was not trained to do that.”

Bin-Mussalam argued that curriculum development should not only equip young people to build AI tools that reflect their own realities but must also be reoriented to encourage critical thinking through problem-posing. “Preparing the youth to lead the transformation of intelligence through AI that reflects the realities could take a long term,” he said.

His remarks come as Nigeria begins talks on establishing a technological hub aimed at driving innovation, research, and digital transformation across the continent. The hub, according to the OSC, will provide a platform to harness local talent, encourage knowledge exchange, and foster sustainable development through technology.

Bin-Mussalam stressed the importance of empowering Africa’s youthful population with future-ready skills. “We should impart to our youth the ability, not to answer a question, but to articulate the right questions, to analyse their society and problematise the issues to resolve them,” he concluded