FIANTSO AI Pedagogical Chatbot — Coaching Under-Certified Primary Teachers in Rural Madagascar

FIANTSO ("Fianarana Tsara Orina", Roots for Learning), led by FHI 360 and funded by the Hempel Foundation (10 million DKK, 2025-2027) in partnership with Madagascar's Ministry of National Education, works across 170 schools in 22 education zones of the Atsimo Atsinanana region in southeastern Madagascar — where 80% of primary teachers lack initial certification and only 4% have the content knowledge needed to teach foundational literacy and numeracy.

In fall 2025, FHI 360 built an AI chatbot trained on Ministry-of-Education-validated Malagasy-language and mathematics instructional modules, supporting regional dialect variation, with guardrails restricting it to pedagogy-related questions to reduce the risk of hallucinated answers.

A three-week pilot in Farafangana in January 2026, with 16 teachers and instructional leaders, found 80% rated the tool easy or very easy to use, 70% rated it very useful, and roughly two-thirds used it two to three times a week, both in school and at home.

This is a short, small, uncontrolled usability pilot (16 participants, three weeks) measuring ease-of-use and perceived usefulness, not classroom learning outcomes. Whether the teacher engagement it documents translates into measurable pupil literacy or numeracy gains has not yet been evaluated.

Read the full analysis: https://www.fhi360.org/articles/new-ai-chatbot-aims-to-boost-teacher-pedagogical-support/