Education · Ordinary People
Sylvia Osewe traded evenings of handwritten lesson plans for 30 minutes before class
Kajiado County, Kenya
A teacher with up to 200 students a day was close to leaving the profession, then handed the lesson planning to a chatbot and kept the part of the job that mattered.
The person and the place
Sylvia Osewe teaches at Oloosirkon Primary School in Kajiado County, in the dry savanna south of Nairobi, and sees up to 200 students in a day. She is also the school's guidance counseling teacher.
The problem they cared about
Kenya's public schools were short 98,261 teachers when Rest of World reported the figure in April 2025, and in 2022 about 44 teachers walked away from the profession every day, by the government commission's own count. A shortage like that shows up in a teacher's life as workload. Osewe spent hours of every evening writing lesson plans by hand, on top of the marking and the record-keeping the job already carried. "It was draining, my job became a prison," she told Forbes Africa. Early on, it nearly ended her career. "I wanted to quit; it was very difficult," she told Rest of World.
The agency moment
In 2023 a Kenyan nonprofit called Kalasik Education came to Oloosirkon and showed the teachers a chatbot it had built on an OpenAI model and aimed at the Kenyan curriculum. Osewe had assumed none of it was meant for her. "I thought it was for the younger generation," she told Forbes Africa. She started on a phone. And she set her own terms, which is the part that matters, because the tool does not always stay where it is pointed. Kalasik's own chief technology officer told Rest of World the chatbot is supposed to draw only on Kenyan curriculum textbooks and approved sites, and that it sometimes strays onto the wider internet, which the team is working to fix. So Osewe cross-checks the lesson against the textbook before she teaches it, and when a lesson lands badly she asks for a simpler way in.
What changed, with evidence
Planning the English, social studies, and Christian religious education lessons, which used to fill her evenings, now happens in about 30 minutes before class. "Since I started using Kalasik, I have more time," Osewe told Rest of World. "The time I used to spend writing lesson plans can now be used to attend to the children." Sixteen months later Forbes Africa found the same arc: hours-long tasks had come down to minutes. "I felt like someone who had won the lottery," Osewe told them. She uses it for quizzes too, and for project rubrics, and, in her counseling role, for behavior contracts and letters home. She keeps a hand on the brake. "AI is a good tool; it makes work easier. We cannot, however, rely on it 100% because it cannot take the place of a human teacher," she told Rest of World. She began on a phone. When Rest of World visited, the school's computer lab held a single desktop from the early aughts under a red Maasai blanket, and the head teacher unlocked a wall cupboard holding six more dated machines, too few, she said, for the school's 1,015 students. Most of Kenya's schools have no internet connection at all. "For those who lack frequent internet access, AI is an idea far from being a doable solution," Bushnell Peter told Rest of World; his job at the Teachers Service Commission is training teachers to use technology. Osewe worries about the access gap closest to her: the students who can reach these tools from home and the ones who cannot.
The move worth copying
Osewe cross-checks the lesson against the textbook before she teaches it, and that one habit is the difference between a tool and a shortcut, especially with a tool its own builders say still wanders. If you use one of these things for work that matters, check it against the source you already trust. Share this with the teacher in your life who is still planning lessons at ten at night.
"It makes me feel like I am biased when other students are not able to use the same advantage." — Sylvia Osewe, Rest of World
Sources
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