Education & AI for Africa

FROM THE ARCHIVE

Five Moves Ahead

Published Monday, 19 October 2026 · 4-minute read

Hello.

Here is a story from the classroom. It has a chessboard in it, and a naira sum.

Our students play chess. They have done for the past four years. When we started, almost all of them had never played chess before. Our first tournament was Ecobank's, in 2024. This year, at the 2026 Ecobank tournament of over a hundred schools, we came thirty-ninth.

Thirty-ninth is not a trophy. But think about what it means. Sixty seven schools finished behind us. And every one of our players spent that day doing something hard.

Watch any child at a chessboard. She does not move a piece and hope. She looks. If I go here, he goes there. Then I go here. Then he has two choices. She holds the whole tree in her head, branch by branch, and she checks it before she touches anything. Five moves ahead. Sometimes more. Nobody is marking it. Nobody is helping. If she is wrong, the board tells her within three moves.

That is reasoning. Planning. Holding steps together. Checking. Changing course when the plan fails.

I should confess. I don't know how to play chess.

The Baseline

In August of this year, we gave children a Baseline of internationally benchmarked foundations in Maths, Reading, Science, Logic and Technology.

One of the questions was a money problem with two steps. Think of something like this. Mama buys twelve akara at ₦50 each. She pays with a ₦1,000 note. How much change will she get?

The children could multiply. They could subtract. Each skill, tested alone, they had. But two in three could not hold the problem together. They multiplied and stopped. Or they subtracted the wrong number. Or they did both steps and wrote down the answer to the first.

Children from the same school. The same corridors, the same teachers, as the ones who think five moves ahead.

How is that possible?

The Thinking Ability is There

The thinking is not missing. I want to loud that, because the easy conclusion is that these children cannot reason. But that's wrong because the chessboard says otherwise. They reason beautifully. They just do not know that the reasoning they use at the board is the same one needed in Maths.

Nobody told them it was the same thing.

We teach in compartments. Chess is a game. Maths is a subject. Money is something adults handle. A child meets each one in its own room, and nobody opens the door between them.

So the planning stays at the board. The multiplication stays in the exercise book. And the naira sum, which needs both at once, falls through the gap.

What AI Changes

This is the question I keep coming back to as AI arrives in our homes.

What does a child actually need now?

Not recall on its own. Recall is free. Any phone will tell your child that twelve times fifty is six hundred. It will do the subtraction too.

If school is a place where children store facts and procedures, the machine has already finished school.

What the machine cannot do for your child is to notice that a problem has two steps. Decide which comes first. Hold the first answer while working the second. Look at the result and ask: does this make sense? Is ₦400 change about right for twelve akara paid with a ₦1,000 note?

That is the work. And it is exactly the work our chess players already do, on a board, for fun.

AI has changed what matters. The value has moved from remembering towards reasoning. And reasoning is not one subject. It is the thread that joins the subjects up.

Do not get me wrong. We have always needed reasoning. And thinking. I believe AI now makes it glaring. In our faces.

Pointing it at the sum

That is why we built Kádé Labs Academy the way we did. Logic is one of nine Foundations, beside Words, Numbers, Science and the rest. But it does not sit on its own shelf.

The planning a child learns in Logic is the planning she needs for a two-step sum in Numbers, a fair test in Science, an argument in Voice. Every Foundation runs the same way.

The Baseline shows the gaps. Practice closes each one. Learn teaches what nobody taught. The Benchmark measures her against the world: the NCEE, Cambridge, TIMSS, Singapore.

And the foundations do not stay in school. In later years each one turns into work. Numbers becomes Costing. Logic becomes Negotiating. Life, when you think about it, is just chess with people. The board becomes the job. Or the business. Or even the relationship.

Picture a woman who sells akara by the roadside. Her son plays chess at our school. Teach him to cost a tray, keep a ledger and plan five moves ahead in the market as well as on the board, and one stall becomes two. Two become a chain across the state. Same akara. Different thinking.

What Next?

Here is what you can do this week, with no app at all. Next time your child solves something, at the board or in the homework book, ask two questions. What did you do first? Why that first? A child who can answer has reasoned. A child who cannot has remembered, or guessed well.

Then hand them a sum from your own day. The transfer charge on your mobile money, every week, for a year. The price of tomatoes this week against last. Let them carry the board into the kitchen.

The thinking is there. It was always there. But nobody pointed it at the sum.

Our job, as parents, teachers and policymakers, is to point it. Consumers to learners to builders. Kádé Labs Academy.

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AI for Africa comes out every two weeks. Next issue: an idea from the posting board.