Nomfundo AI — Schools Online Foundation's AI Teaching Assistant in Eswatini Schools

The Schools Online Foundation, an Eswatini education NGO working with the Ministry of Education and Training, began training an AI chatbot called Nomfundo in August 2023 on the national syllabus, and rolled it out from the week of 19 January 2024 at Evelyn Baring, Salesian and Somnjalose High Schools. Nomfundo answers questions in a conversational, speech-enabled interface, helps teachers draft lesson plans and tests, and assists students with essay composition, marking guidance, siSwati translation, and life-skills and guidance-and-counselling content aligned to the Eswatini curriculum.

By early 2024 the platform had expanded to eight schools, which foundation director Lungelo Dlamini said saw end-of-year results 'improve tremendously' — a claim reported by the Times of Eswatini but not independently verified or backed by published data. Dlamini also acknowledged the model is 'costly': at roughly E50,000 in running costs, some richer features such as diagrams and video have already been disabled to save money, and expansion to rural schools is on hold pending further funding.

The rollout has drawn public pushback. The Swaziland National Association of Teachers said the education sector 'is not ready' for the tool, noting many teachers and students still struggle with basic technology and have not been trained on how the system works, and a University of Eswatini lecturer separately warned that premature reliance on AI without adequate safeguards risks weakening institutional capacity in under-resourced systems. The practice is included as an honestly-flagged, still-unverified early deployment rather than a proven model.

Read the full analysis: http://www.times.co.sz/news/143527-online-robot-teacher-for-schools.html