Less time preparing, more time teaching: How AI is helping refugee teachers

Co-authored by Vodafone Foundation and Learning Equality

Today there are 12.4 million school-aged refugee children, of which 46% are missing out on an education. That's over 5.5 million children not in school. Those who do attend encounter teachers who often face overcrowded classrooms, multiple languages, scarce resources, and extremely limited preparation time.

It is in this context that Vodafone Foundation and Learning Equality are leveraging AI to strengthen pedagogical support for refugee teachers, complement teacher training and provide ready-to-use lesson plans with an aim of better equipping teachers in classrooms with limited resources.

We are building this into the Instant Network Schools (INS) programme - a partnership between Vodafone Foundation and UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, that brings quality digital education to refugee-hosting schools. INS currently operates across six African countries. To date, we have reached more than 382,000 students and over 6,800 teachers, so there is potential for AI to have a huge impact on the quality of education in these communities.

We started our AI integration pilot in Egypt and South Sudan. This initiative builds on years of foundational work by Learning Equality, Vodafone Foundation and UNHCR to improve the process of bringing together relevant, supplemental content that can support teaching and learning.

Since its inception, Learning Equality has focused on making high-quality educational resources accessible offline and developing tools to align them with national curricula. In low-resource contexts, this alignment is essential: it ensures that teachers and learners can discover and engage with content that is both relevant and accessible.

Guided lesson plans are the natural next step - providing structured guidance and classroom activities alongside organizing these aligned resources into structured, pedagogically sound sequences that teachers can use directly in the classroom.

Four lessons from our pilots in Egypt and South Sudan:

1. Teacher capacity is the most powerful lever for student learning.

Research shows that teacher knowledge can explain up to 37% of the variation in student achievement. Strengthening refugee teachers’ ability to engage learners in overcrowded classrooms is one of the most effective investments we can make.

2. Guided lesson plans are an impactful entry point.

Aligned to national curricula and integrated with life skills, these plans are built on active learning methods and come with ready-made resources, such as presentations, quizzes, and interactive activities. This saves teachers valuable preparation time while boosting their confidence and classroom engagement.

Just as importantly, the lesson plans provide a meaningful way for teachers to adopt technology-enabled, student-centred approaches. For many refugee teachers, who often have little access to training or ongoing professional development, this structured guidance acts as a bridge, helping them confidently deploy active pedagogy in their classrooms.

3. Human-led inputs are critical to drive AI.

In Egypt, over 780 lesson plans were researched, co-designed, and piloted with teachers, then refined into a standardized structure linked to the INS Teaching for Life framework.

In South Sudan, we followed another approach: documenting the human “thought process” behind lesson planning by capturing the sequencing of decisions, instructional approaches, and references used.

Both of these pilots are being evaluated by humans, and can inform future improvements in lesson plan design. This not only makes today’s lesson plans usable, but also creates structured inputs to inform how AI can replicate high-quality pedagogical decision-making at scale.

4. AI is an enabler, not a replacement.

As of now, AI supports transcription, translation, and structuring of content. Looking forward, it can accelerate lesson plan production across geographies. But human expertise in pedagogy and cultural context remains essential to ensure quality and relevance.

Impact in the classroom

Teachers themselves are already reaping the benefits of having contextually-specific lesson plans. As one INS teacher reflected in Egypt: “With the new guided lesson plans and digital resources, I can spend less time preparing and more time engaging my students. Even in a crowded classroom, I see more participation and excitement for learning.”

By embedding active, student-centred methods into every plan, this approach is also helping teachers deploy new technology-enabled strategies that might otherwise remain out of reach. Teachers not only save time but also gain a practical pathway to more engaging and participatory classrooms.

Looking ahead

As AI evolves, these pilots demonstrate the potential of combining human expertise with AI efficiency to deliver lesson plans that are both scalable and context-appropriate. For teachers, this means more confidence and less preparation time. For students, it means more engaging lessons that build knowledge as well as critical life skills.

Vodafone Foundation and Learning Equality are committed to continuing to explore how AI can drive the creation of educator-support materials, including for use across more INS countries. Guided by a pedagogy-first approach and continuous teacher feedback, our goal is not to replace teachers but to empower them, and to bring out the best in every learner, even in the most challenging circumstances.