CACAIS 2025 Faculty Workshop Report: Promises, Perils, and a Way Forward for Generative Artificial Intelligence in African Higher Education Institutions

This paper synthesizes insights from a faculty workshop held as part of CACAIS 2025 on integrating generative AI (GenAI) into African higher education. Drawing on participant discussions, it examines institutional, pedagogical, ethical, infrastructural, and geopolitical dimensions of GenAI adoption. While GenAI offers potential to transform teaching, learning, and research, participants cautioned that it may also reinforce inequalities, threaten data sovereignty, and challenge academic integrity. Key barriers include limited infrastructure, scarce training, technological opacity, and misalignment with African academic contexts. Building on these concerns, we propose a roadmap that embeds GenAI within long-term institutional strategies, develops local governance and ethical frameworks, invests in infrastructure, builds faculty capacity, and adapts curricula and pedagogy. By surfacing structural tensions and offering actionable directions, this paper contributes to global debates on GenAI in higher education while foregrounding a Sub-Saharan African perspective on equitable, context-sensitive digital transformation.