UNESCO launched an Observatory on AI in Education for Latin America and the Caribbean in April 2026. The first line of the briefing document should stop every educator in their tracks.
Six out of ten sixth-grade students in the region cannot meet minimum proficiency in basic reading and mathematics.
And over 50% of teachers in countries like Chile and Brazil are already using generative AI in their classrooms. Fewer than 10% of their schools have any formal guidelines for how to use it.
Read those numbers together. Most students cannot read well enough. Most teachers are using AI anyway. Almost nobody has rules.
The UNESCO position is blunt
The Observatory brings together 33 Ministries of Education with a founding principle that UNESCO states openly: "Education must govern AI, not the other way around."
Their concern is not that teachers are using AI. It is that teachers are using AI without understanding it, without guidance, and without the foundational skills in their students to make that use meaningful. UNESCO warns that uncritical adoption of AI tools risks "deprofessionalising" teachers, stripping away pedagogical autonomy and replacing it with algorithmic dependency.
That warning does not only apply to Latin America. It applies to any school where teachers are using AI tools without a framework for thinking about what those tools are doing.
Africa faces a different version of the same problem
In Africa, the urgency comes from a different direction. Intelligence reports from March 2026 showed an 87% surge in AI-assisted biometric fraud across Southern Africa. Deepfakes. Digital impersonation. Identity theft at scale.
For the African Union, AI literacy is not an education nice-to-have. It is a security requirement. Their Continental AI Strategy is in its first phase of aggressive capacity building, and it includes funding for foundational literacy technologies and AI-enabled assessment through Technical and Vocational Education and Training systems.
The G7 noted that only 5% of Africa's technology talent has access to the computational power needed for complex development work. The gap is not just in skills. It is in infrastructure, access, and opportunity. Without intervention, the economic benefits of AI will bypass the Global South entirely.
What this tells schools in the UK
You might be reading this from a well-resourced school in Surrey or Manchester and thinking: this is not our problem.
It is.
The UK's own data says 97% of businesses have critical AI skills gaps. The Department for Education has published AI guidance. Ofsted is watching. PISA 2029 is coming. And most UK schools are in the same position as schools in Santiago or Johannesburg: teachers using AI without training, students engaging with AI without literacy, and schools operating without a framework.
The scale is different. The problem is the same.
UNESCO's core argument applies everywhere: you cannot layer AI on top of weak foundations and expect it to work. Students need strong subject knowledge before AI literacy means anything. Teachers need to understand their own subject's connection to AI before they can teach it. And schools need a system for delivering this across the curriculum, not a one-off event.
The schools that get this right will be the ones that start with what teachers already know and show them where AI literacy lives inside it. Not as an add-on. Not as a separate lesson. As a lens on the teaching they are already doing.
That is the principle AILitKit is built on. Start with the lesson. Find the connection. Give the teacher the words, the activities, and the confidence. Subject by subject. Lesson by lesson.
Because the alternative, doing nothing and hoping the foundations hold, is what UNESCO just told us does not work.
Matthew Wemyss is the founder of AILitKit and IN&ED, and author of AI in Education: An Educator's Handbook.