At this moment of rapid technological change, where Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reshaping societies and changing the way we work, think, innovate and interact with each other, how can we use AI to better understand and improve society? It is the question behind all the others about AI, and very few countries are asking it out loud.

Rwanda is taking the lead in asking these questions. In April 2023, Rwanda became the first country in Africa to establish a comprehensive national AI policy. The policy is based on five principles: beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, justice and explicability.

In June 2026, Rwanda became the first African country to establish an institution devoted to AI governance and innovation, the National Artificial Intelligence Agency. Most recently, in July 2026, President Paul Kagame was appointed by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) as co-chair, alongside Salesforce chair and chief executive Marc Benioff, of the United Nations AI for Good Global Commission.

At that inaugural meeting, President Kagame said: "Artificial intelligence is the common denominator that will redefine healthcare, education and energy, among many other sectors. As a commission, our mission is to ensure this transformation does not widen existing divisions. The task ahead of us is urgent, but we will face challenges. The objective is not just to have a conversation. It is to ensure that everything we agree to do gets translated into tangible and practical outcomes.”

Rwanda is one of the few countries in the world deliberately asking the key question: How can AI be used for the common good? Asking it is the easier half. The harder half is deciding who will be equipped to answer it.

One essential question that must be asked and answered is how we ensure young people in Rwanda and in every country in the world have the knowledge, digital skills and ethical framework to use these technologies to better their societies. Education must go beyond digital literacy.

Knowing how to prompt a chatbot is not the same as knowing whether to believe what it returns, or what a community should do about it. Students should be trained in how to use AI to evaluate information and to engage with and improve their communities and countries.

A recently signed memorandum of understanding between Rwanda’s Centre for Peace, Democratic Governance and Development (CPDG) and the Global Centre for Rehumanising Democracy (GCRD) offers an opportunity to introduce an innovative approach to such an education. For the past two years we have been developing AI-based tools to both identify disinformation and to better understand public discourse in communities and countries. Public discourse is measured across four categories (civility, empathy, trust and democratic agency) using an AI tool called the Democracy Discourse Index.

Most democracy indices measure institutions: elections, courts, constitutions. The Index measures what those instruments cannot capture — the moral and relational quality of the language a society uses when it talks to itself — on the premise that public discourse degrades well before institutions do.

Students and faculty are building and training this AI tool at universities in the US, Pakistan, Greece, Albania, Bulgaria and North Macedonia. They are not so much studying the index as building it, hand-coding real public conversation — local news comments, broadcast transcripts, social media threads — to create the ground truth the model learns from.

The Index, as our colleagues put it, "treats students as knowledge producers, not just students of democracy.” In the autumn, universities from the UK, Ecuador, Ukraine, India and Lebanon will join this global education project. Recently, on a global webinar, a group of faculty and students participating in this effort this semester shared their perspective.

That session, on 10 August, was the first public presentation of findings: students set out the patterns of democratic stress — and of resilience — that they had traced in the discourse of their own societies. The recording is public, and it is worth an hour of any Rwandan educator’s time.

We believe that tools like this could be very valuable in Rwanda. Not only to teach youth how to use AI to gain a better understanding of the progress and challenges in their country, but — with persistent genocide ideology— to identify and call out misinformation, to develop accountability indices for path-breaking initiatives like Imihigo and citizen score cards, and to contribute to positive public dialogue.

Through this collaboration, Rwandan youth, especially students in local universities are set to become the first in East and Central Africa to contribute directly to a global democracy-building initiative while applying AI to nation-building at home—identifying misinformation, countering hate speech and genocide ideology, and strengthening the informed public dialogue on which Rwanda’s continued progress depends. This work is especially urgent not only for Rwanda, but for countries across Africa facing similar challenges in an increasingly digital public sphere.

The accountability point deserves particular emphasis. Rwanda already measures what its officials deliver, through Imihigo, and what its citizens experience, through scorecards. What no country yet measures is the quality of the conversation in which that accountability is argued out — and it is precisely in that conversation that denial and hate speech do their work, now on social platforms rather than on the radio.

Margee Ensign recently submitted an article to a major publication about the progress in Rwanda. The response was stunning—that clearly, she was not a scholar of Rwanda because her article did not fit the "current dialogue” (or stereotype more appropriately) about Rwanda.

That is not a scholarly judgement. It is the description of a closed loop, in which evidence is admitted only when it confirms what is already believed. Ensuring such loops are open is precisely what an index of public discourse is built to do. It is time for Rwandan students, scholars, and committed citizens to identify and counter disinformation, hate speech and genocide ideology, and to continue contributing to positive public discourse.

The memorandum between CPDG and GCRD is an invitation rather than a finished programme. Rwandan universities that want their students to build this work rather than merely consume it should take it up this academic year.

A country that was first in Africa with an AI policy, and first with an institution to govern it, has an obvious next claim to make: the first to teach its young people to hold public conversation itself to a measurable standard.

Authors:

Pierre Damien Habumuremyi is a Political Science expert and the Chairman of the Board of the Center for Peace, Democratic Governance and Development (CPDG), East and Central Africa.

Margee Ensign is a Senior Fellow at Bard College and the Board Chair of the Global Center for Rehumanizing Democracy, a UK-based non-partisan "think–act–teach tank".

Further contributions by:

Jacob Udo-Udo Jacob is a seasoned international democracy researcher and Executive Director of the Global Center for Rehumanizing Democracy.

Patrice Habinshuti is a Rwandan international development expert, and President of the Center for Peace, Democratic Governance and Development.