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Africell will help researchers at Oxford University investigate the economic and social impact of AfriGPT, Africell’s innovative SMS-based AI service.
Africell and Oxford University have agreed to collaborate on a groundbreaking research project into the economic and social impact of AI tools in west Africa.
Funded in part by Schmidt Sciences’s $3 million ‘AI at Work Program’, researchers at Oxford University’s Internet Institute and Department of Economics will study ‘AfriGPT’, an innovative SMS-based AI chat tool available to Africell customers in Sierra Leone and The Gambia.
AfriGPT is a flexible and low-cost subscription service through which users interact with ChatGPT via SMS. The service requires only 2G mobile connectivity, meaning that users do not need to pay for or have access to data. The minimalist, SMS-based design of AfriGPT overcomes a critical barrier to the adoption of AI chatbots in low-income or frontier geographies – namely, a lack of internet connection – and thus offers researchers a unique case study for how generative AI tools can be adopted by unconventional or otherwise excluded user bases with applications including job search, entrepreneurship and education.
“Tools such as ChatGPT are increasingly taken for granted in Europe and North America. However, for both economic and technological reasons, they are much less common in Africa,” explains Sam Williams, Africell’s Group Communications Director.
“AfriGPT is promising because it enables mobile users in countries such as Sierra Leone, where internet penetration remains relatively low, to use AI chatbots without the need for internet access. Africell is happy to support this rigorous research by world-class scholars because we are keen to see whether our instincts about AfriGPT’s utility and value are corroborated by data”.
Subscribers to AfriGPT pay a small fee to be able to receive AI-generated answers to questions submitted by SMS. The system is linked to ChatGPT. This means that whereas most global users of ChatGPT require a smartphone and high-speed internet connection, AfriGPT subscribers need only a feature phone and basic 2G coverage. The service opens the potential advantages of ChatGPT to a poorer, younger and more rural demographic than would otherwise be possible.
A preliminary survey undertaken by Oxford researchers in April 2025 revealed striking patterns in how AfriGPT is used in Sierra Leone compared to ChatGPT’s usage internationally. The new, more detailed research programme enabled by the grant from Schmidt Sciences is expected to yield further insights into how AfriGPT is employed in different regions, on different types of devices, and at different times of year.
Johanna Barop, a DPhil researcher in Oxford’s Internet Institute, and Joseph Levine, a DPhil researcher in Oxford’s Department of Economics, say that their project’s aim is to understand the behaviours, social and economic conditions and other factors that affect, restrict or encourage AI use in Africa.
“We want to understand how AI chatbots are used in Sub-Sahara Africa, how this is different from global use, and what the benefits and risks of AI in this context are,” they explain.
“There is very little research on how AI is used in low-income and rural contexts in Africa, and we need more evidence and insights to make sure that AI tools are developed and distributed with such communities in mind.”
