AI as the final blow to Somaliland’s education system

My recent experiences as a senior university lecturer in Hargeisa have brought me to a sobering conclusion. A new and formidable technological force is sweeping through our classrooms, delivering what may be the final blow to an education system already bruised and faltering. I did not find the evidence buried in data reports or exposed by advanced detection tools. It was scattered plainly across my desk, in the polished, oddly uniform assignments handed in by my students, and in the uneasy silence that followed whenever I asked them to explain their own writing.

In the soft hum of the lecture halls and the cramped, sun-warmed offices where I meet my students, I have watched the same pattern unfold. Perfectly structured papers appear from students who struggle to form a single coherent paragraph in conversation. When I ask simple questions, about the mechanisms of a drug interaction they supposedly analyzed, or to walk me through the steps of a pharmacokinetics calculation they “explained” so elegantly in writing, their eyes drift downward, their voices flatten, and the façade collapses.

The painful truth is now impossible to ignore, instead of using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to sharpen their understanding or strengthen their skills, many students are using it to completely bypass the act of thinking. In any strong, functional education system, this would register as a significant challenge, but here in Somaliland, it threatens to be a catastrophe.

Our current educational structure is already fundamentally crippled. We face a critical shortage of trained teachers, a problem rooted in exceptionally low public sector salaries that drive the most capable educators into private institutions, making quality education inaccessible to the majority of our population. Our Ministry of Education and Science remains weakened and has yet to provide a harmonized curriculum or effective oversight, while the Somaliland Higher Education Commission lacks the capacity to adequately regulate the purely commercialized universities that have unfortunately become little more than marketplaces for degrees.

Added to this is the crucial yet paradoxically overlooked challenge of the language barrier. I have noticed, in a way that feels both confusing and unsettling, that despite the overwhelmingly English internet reaching almost across the country, many younger students, especially those from public schools, still struggle with the most basic elements of the language. This struggle often leaves them cognitively detached from the material, unable to fully grasp its meaning without a lecturer stepping in to bridge the gap.

These systemic failures have created a void where vital courses, such as Logic 101, that are essential for cultivating critical thinking are often missing from the curriculum. Consequently, students are deprived of the core ability to analyze, brainstorm, or synthesize ideas, hindering their capacity to reason out things on their own, which is the most important purpose of education. This is the fragile, broken system into which the full force of generative AI has now been introduced.

Globally, scholarly debate centers on whether AI will enhance critical thinking or gradually dull it through what researchers call “cognitive offloading”? A student who simply copies and pastes to and from AI prompt, without the slightest effort from his side, is offloading 100% of their critical thinking. In our case, a student who already, by language barrier and pedagogical failure, was detached from the content of their studies, using AI in such a reckless way will lead to an imminent national disaster.

As developed nations establish comprehensive policies — where the EU classifies AI in education as "high risk," and Singapore is funding mandatory AI literacy — we in Somaliland are, as always, doing nothing. We should observe our neighbors: Rwanda, for instance, recently launched a National AI Policy focused not on banning these tools, but on equipping its workforce with essential digital and AI literacy skills. The country also partnered with giant companies like ALX and Anthropic to officially integrate AI into its educational system.

The simple fact is that we cannot, and should not, stop the use of Artificial Intelligence; the tools are already on every student’s mobile device. The choice before us is not whether to embrace or reject AI, but whether to proactively and strategically manage its integration.

In a country like ours, I believe that well-delivered AI literacy can not only help students excel in their studies, it can also begin to compensate for the failures of our educational system. I am not suggesting that these failures should be overlooked; we must continue to push for the grassroots changes our system urgently needs. But we should not stand by and watch entire generations drift away while we wait for those reforms to arrive.

In other words, the challenge posed by AI to our students leaves us with no third option. Either we step in and guide them to use it in ways that deepen their understanding, or we stand by and watch them lose what little thinking skills they have managed to build over the course of their young lives.

I am therefore issuing an urgent call to all stakeholders: The Ministry of Education and Science, the Higher Education Commission, parents, and community-focused NGOs. We must commission broad, immediate research on the full impact of this issue and swiftly formulate a strategic national move.

We must decide, without delay, whether we will provide the necessary training for our teachers and students to utilize this amazing tool responsibly, or whether we will stand by, paralyzed, and allow it to become the source of a final, fatal mental offloading that utterly decimates the critical thinking of an entire generation. With the existing fragility of our education system and this new, monumental AI hurdle, if no meaningful action is taken, the direction in which Somaliland’s future is heading is deeply, chillingly worrisome.