Artificial Intelligence and the Academic Lecturer in African Higher Education: A Narrative Review of Preparedness, Perceptions, and Possibilities

Abstract

This narrative review challenges the dominant narrative that African university lecturers are unprepared or resistant to artificial intelligence (AI), asking instead: what happens when willing, innovative academics encounter institutional environments that systematically thwart their agency? Synthesizing 52 peer-reviewed studies and gray literature (2014–2025), with a predominant focus on Anglophone East and Southern Africa while acknowledging the relative absence of Francophone, Lusophone, and Arabic-speaking scholarship, through an integrated lens of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) and Institutional Theory, this review maps the structural, pedagogical, and governance factors shaping lecturers' engagement with AI across African higher education. The analysis reveals a profound disconnect: lecturers demonstrate high awareness and genuine enthusiasm for AI's pedagogical potential, yet their aspirations collapse under three intersecting failures, including chronic infrastructural deficits (reported in 90% of studies), a complete absence of pedagogy-focused training, and a governance vacuum in which fewer than half of institutions possess any formal AI policy. This produces four distinct realities: the constrained dreamer, pedagogy adrift, the shadow of the Global North, and policy spectatorship. The paper argues that African lecturers are not laggards but constrained innovators, and that their exclusion from AI debates reflects systemic, not individual, failure. The proposed Contextually-Grounded, Lecturer-Centric (C-LEC) Framework offers a pragmatic, measurable model for universities and policymakers, with concrete indicators for tracking pedagogical capacity-building against infrastructure procurement, prioritizing pedagogical capacity-building before technological procurement and co-developing ethical guardrails with lecturers. Without deliberate, lecturer-centered intervention, AI risks hardening, rather than bridging, global educational inequalities. This review provides an evidence-based roadmap for moving from aspirational rhetoric to implementable practice in African higher education.