Impact Partnerships:
Building AI to strengthen teacher training in Kenya

Two questions come up whenever a nonprofit hands a build to student engineers. Will they ship something real, and will anyone still be using it once the term ends.

This session works through both by looking at a live partnership between a UCL student team and Dignitas, a Kenyan education nonprofit.

Dignitas built LeadNow, a platform that trains and coaches instructional leaders across Kenyan schools, now serving 5,600 users. Through UCL's IXN for Good programme, a student team added AI to LeadNow so teachers and Education Officers could work faster and reach more schools.

Their work included a chatbot that answers teacher questions from LeadNow's own training content, personalised progress summaries drawn from each teacher's activity, AI feedback on scenario-based learning exercises, and an Education Officer agent that handles WhatsApp messaging, database queries, and English to Swahili translation.

Ciro Reynoso, who leads tech partnerships at Tech To The Rescue, hosts the conversation and puts the questions to both sides.

What you will learn

Why Dignitas chose to bring a student team into a platform that thousands of teachers already rely on.

What the collaboration asked of each side week to week, from Dignitas's staff to the student engineers and their supervisors.

The AI features the team shipped, described in plain terms, and the data decisions that sat underneath them.

Where a proof of concept goes after the semester ends, and how Dignitas plans to take the work forward.

Who should attend?

• Students and early-career engineers who want to put their skills toward social impact work

• Academics and programme leads running, or thinking about running, university partnerships with nonprofits

• Tech professionals weighing up their first pro bono project

• Social impact organizations wondering whether a student build could work for their own product

• Anyone interested in how AI reaches classrooms and clinics in the places that need it most

Featured speakers:

Sheena Visram

Co-Founder and Chair of UCL IXN for Good

Marita Adhiambo

Edtech Program Officer at Dignitas

Hosted by:

Ciro Reynoso

Tech Partnerships Manager at Tech To The Rescue