What Africa Teaches a Travelling Teacher?

Francis Bizoza, The African Travelling Teacher, on travelling across Africa, connecting people and reimagining education

Francis Bizoza’s life began in uncertainty. He was born in 1991 in southwestern Uganda, close to the borders of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. As his mother later told him, fighting erupted across the border only a day after his birth. When explosions reached the area around the hospital, she fled carrying her newborn son. Exhausted, she eventually had to put him down, but the nurse who had delivered him the previous day was following behind and helped them reach safety.

Francis was the youngest of nine children. Insecurity remained part of his childhood. His mother taught at a local community school, while his father worked at a secondary school some thirteen kilometres from home. Whenever the situation became threatening, Francis was sent to stay with one of his siblings. By the time he finished primary school, he had attended seven different schools.

Looking back, it is tempting to see the origins of The African Travelling Teacher in this childhood of movement, adaptation and changing environments. Francis himself is more cautious about drawing a straight line between past and present, but those years gave him an unusually broad experience of education. School was never just one building, one teacher or one community. Learning continued even when the surroundings changed.

Both of his parents were teachers, yet becoming a teacher was not part of Francis’s original plan. As a boy he dreamed of becoming a priest, partly inspired by priests who visited his community and left their motorcycles at his family home while they celebrated Mass nearby. Later, journalism, law and information technology seemed more attractive.

When the time came to enter university, however, his parents had retired and the family could not afford the course he would have preferred. An older brother suggested that he study education and English, with the idea that he could later move into journalism. Francis reluctantly agreed. In fact, for almost a year he and some fellow education students told friends they were studying law.

At Makerere University, money was tight. His brother helped with tuition fees, but Francis had to find money for accommodation, meals and study materials himself. He attended university from Monday to Wednesday and spent the rest of the week doing casual work on construction sites.

Then a missed class changed the direction of his life. To make up for a comparative education lecture he had missed, Francis joined an evening class taught by a lecturer named Olivia Mugabirwe. She arrived with a laptop and projector. This may sound ordinary, but to Francis it was almost magical. He had seen a laptop, but he had never seen a projector being used in teaching and could not understand how the image travelled from the computer onto the wall.

The class was given an assignment that required them to leave the university, interview people and investigate why a curriculum based on teaching young children in their mother tongue was difficult to implement in urban Uganda. They talked with police officers and visited a primary school. The final task was to present their findings digitally.

Francis had never made a PowerPoint presentation. A friend pointed him towards a YouTube tutorial, and he learned enough to put one together. He remembers it as a very poor presentation, yet his group was judged the best.

The experience changed his relationship with teaching. If he was going to become a teacher, he decided, he wanted to become the kind of teacher who opened new worlds for students in the way Olivia had opened one for him.

That encounter reveals the way Francis thinks about innovation. Technology mattered, but the decisive factor was the teacher who used it to create a different kind of learning experience.

Innovation starts with people

When we talk about innovation, attention tends to turn quickly towards AI, breakthrough technologies, venture capital and fast-growing companies. Francis’ thinking begins with people: teachers, students, families and communities, and with the relationships that allow knowledge to move between them.

This human-centred approach has shaped his work as The African Travelling Teacher, an education and storytelling initiative through which he travels to underserved communities by road, identifies inspiring teachers, works with learners and connects schools with broader learning networks.

One of his ambitions is to restore pride in the teaching profession. Across Africa, he encounters teachers doing remarkable things in difficult circumstances, yet their achievements often remain invisible outside their own communities. By documenting and sharing their stories, he wants not only to spread ideas but also to give teachers recognition for the work they are already doing.

His view of teachers goes beyond the conventional role of delivering curriculum. Teachers can be community builders, mentors, connectors and catalysts for change. Their task, as Francis sees it, is increasingly to create the conditions in which learning can happen.

He describes the teacher less as a person who transfers knowledge and more as an orchestrator of learning experiences: someone who opens doors and helps students explore what they already know, what exists around them and what they might do with it.

Travelling as a way of learning

The African Travelling grew gradually from experiences that Francis began connecting. After university, he became involved in initiatives to help teachers develop digital skills. Later, he joined Teach For Uganda and spent two years teaching in a rural public primary school. That experience changed how he saw many problems he had encountered as a child.

Walking long distances to school, doing household chores before classes or trying to learn on an empty stomach had once simply been part of everyday life. As a teacher, he began to see how profoundly such conditions affected a child’s ability to learn.

The lack of resources forced him to experiment. He used an unfinished building near the school for a poultry project and worked with pupils to learn how chickens could be raised. In another project, students recycled plastics into decorative objects. He arranged for children to travel to a supermarket to select materials themselves, turning a shopping trip into an opportunity to encounter a world beyond their village. He connected teachers from his rural school with an international school so that they could see project-based learning and different teaching practices in action.

None of these ideas required a sophisticated innovation laboratory. They began with a question: What can we do with what we have?

Later, Francis worked with teachers in South Sudan, where schools and communities were still recovering from years of conflict. He found himself again looking for practical ways to build relationships, confidence and learning. Morning jogging sessions with a handful of students developed into reflection circles. Discussions about sustainable development led to practical projects, including making liquid soap when hygiene materials were scarce.

When an international school in Beijing asked him to speak to students about infrastructure in Africa, Francis realised that he did not know his own continent as well as he wanted to.

That uncomfortable realisation became productive. If others could travel around the world to discover places and tell their stories, he began to wonder, why could he not travel across Africa to understand his own continent better? The question developed into The African Travelling Teacher.

Travelling, in this sense, is much more than transportation. It has become a method of learning. Every school offers a different context, every teacher a different perspective and every community a different set of resources, constraints and possibilities.

Scarcity becomes a source of creativity

One of the most interesting lessons from Francis’s work concerns the relationship between resources and innovation.

Conventional innovation thinking often starts from funding, infrastructure, equipment, research facilities and access to technology. Francis spends much of his time in places where many of these resources are limited.

Yet he does not describe these communities as lacking knowledge. “Africa does not lack ideas or knowledge,” he argues. Communities contain rich cultural, environmental and indigenous knowledge that education can help learners recognise and use creatively.

This changes the meaning of scarcity. Scarcity is a real constraint. A school without books, electricity, internet access or adequate facilities faces disadvantages that should not be romanticised. But limited resources can also force teachers and learners to look more carefully at what is already available around them.

A nearby river can become a place to study environmental conservation. Farms, forests and wetlands can become learning environments. Community members can bring local expertise into lessons. Students can use locally available materials for projects or document their own culture through writing, photography, art and video.

For Francis, this is context-responsive teaching: instead of treating the local environment as something education needs to escape from, it becomes part of the learning material.

The principle has broader relevance for innovation. Resource abundance can make it easy to search for solutions outside the immediate context. Scarcity often pushes people in the opposite direction. They start by looking at what they have, what they know, what their community knows and what can be recombined in a different way.

The implication is that innovation does not necessarily have to wait for abundance. Sometimes creativity begins precisely with the question: What can we make possible from here?

Education as both a window and a mirror

This local starting point does not mean Francis wants education to turn inward. Quite the opposite.

One of the ideas running through his work is that education should operate both as a mirror, helping students recognise the value of their own culture and environment, and as a window through which they can understand worlds outside their immediate experience. They belong together.

A child who learns only about the outside world may come to believe that useful knowledge, interesting ideas and successful people exist somewhere else. A child exposed only to the local world, on the other hand, misses the opportunity to understand how ideas and cultures connect across borders. Francis wants both. This is one reason he places such importance on global citizenship and on connecting teachers and students internationally.

A good example is a project that connected children in Uganda (Nyarutembe Community Secondary School in Kisoro, Uganda) with students at an international school in Beijing (Western Academy of Beijing). Ugandan students documented local basket-making and other aspects of their everyday life. Students in Beijing shared videos showing their woodcut art and printing techniques. The exchange was not designed as a flow of knowledge from a wealthy school to a poorer one.

Students on both sides had something to teach. Chinese students learned to make Ugandan-style baskets. Ugandan students encountered Chinese art practices. Funding from Beijing helped provide technology that allowed the Ugandan students to document their lives and communicate with their peers. In a later stage, the students in Beijing used images from Uganda to create woodcut prints, auctioned them and raised money towards facilities for the Ugandan school.

What began as cultural exchange developed into learning, technology transfer, creative production and practical support.

It is a good illustration of Francis’s philosophy: people do not need to become alike in order to learn together. The value comes partly from the differences.

Knowledge needs to travel in every direction

Traditional development models can easily create a distinction between those who have knowledge and those who receive it. Francis wants to challenge that relationship. Teachers in rural African schools should not be seen merely as beneficiaries of expertise produced elsewhere. They are also sources of solutions. The same applies to their students and communities.

Travelling allows Francis to find practices that might otherwise remain local and invisible. Storytelling allows those practices to move. A useful idea developed by a teacher in Uganda may become relevant to a school elsewhere in Africa. A cultural practice documented in one community may inspire children thousands of kilometres away.

This also changes the role of the traveller. Francis does not travel simply because he has something to teach. He travels because he expects to learn.

Why global citizenship matters for innovation?

Francis sees cross-cultural relationships as valuable not only for education but also for innovation. Consider a start-up in Finland developing a product intended for an international market. If that start-up understands only people who share the same cultural and economic environment, their ability to identify needs elsewhere will inevitably be limited. Meaningful global collaboration requires access to people outside our own bubbles.

The argument goes beyond better product development. Francis imagines children in Uganda and Finland working together while they are young and perhaps encountering each other decades later as researchers, entrepreneurs or even co-founders. Relationships created through learning can have effects that cannot be predicted when they begin.

This is a human interpretation of innovation ecosystems. We often draw ecosystems as diagrams consisting of companies, universities, investors and institutions. Francis’s perspective suggests that underneath those structures are relationships that may have started years earlier, sometimes with nothing more ambitious than two young people becoming curious about each other’s worlds.

AI should not make us skip learning

AI introduces an interesting challenge to this philosophy. Francis works in rural schools where access to technology remains uneven. In some of the communities he visits, students and teachers may have little exposure to AI at all. The global debate about generative AI therefore arrives in a context very different from that of connected schools in Europe, North America or African cities.

Francis is not opposed to AI. He sees it as a significant innovation with the potential to contribute to education. His concern is about how it is introduced. Many African education systems have only recently begun placing stronger emphasis on capabilities such as critical thinking, problem-solving, communication and collaborative learning. Moving too quickly towards AI-assisted answers could create a risk that some of these foundational skills are never given enough time to develop.

AI needs to be introduced carefully and intentionally. Teachers and students need to understand not only how to use it, but how to think with it without handing over the process of thinking itself.

This is particularly important where education has traditionally emphasised the reproduction of correct answers. AI can produce answers extraordinarily quickly. If the educational system simply replaces one form of answer-giving with another, very little has changed.

The more interesting opportunity is to ask how AI can support locally meaningful problem-solving. The question is not whether a rural African school should use the same AI application in the same way as a school in Helsinki, Beijing or New York. It is what problems teachers and learners in a community are trying to solve, and whether AI can help them solve those problems while strengthening rather than weakening their ability to think. Technology should enter through the needs of people and their context, not the other way around.

The teacher is a changemaker

Francis talks about teachers with unusual respect, perhaps partly because he once resisted becoming one himself. His own transformation began with one teacher who changed the way he saw the profession. That experience still shapes his belief that a teacher’s impact can extend far beyond a classroom.

A good teacher notices potential, creates opportunities and helps learners believe that something they have never done before is possible. Sometimes the intervention can be surprisingly small. In Francis’s case, a projector, a field assignment and the encouragement to create a PowerPoint presentation helped redirect an entire career. This explains his determination to celebrate teachers working in difficult conditions.

Motivation does not come only from higher salaries or better equipment, although both matter. Recognition matters too. If teachers constantly hear that their schools are failing and their profession is declining, it becomes difficult to sustain pride in their work. Francis wants teachers to see evidence that their small achievements matter.

His dream for the next decade is therefore simple: he wants to see teachers proud of their work, respected in their communities and the teaching profession regain the status it deserves. For him, improving education begins by strengthening the people who make education possible every day.

A human-centered form of leadership

During our conversation, one characteristic of Francis’s thinking kept returning: he starts with the individual person. His language is less about disruption than about trust, dignity, curiosity, service and relationships. Technology enters the conversation, but it rarely occupies the centre.

Even when asked who should be interviewed next, the answer pointed back to this philosophy. He recommended Olivia Mugabirwe, the teacher who had influenced him years earlier. What Francis admires in her is not simply technical competence but a selfless approach to helping other people grow.

He describes her influence as one of the sources of his own people-centred thinking. This helps explain why The African Travelling Teacher is not a story about one travelling teacher. Francis repeatedly tries to redirect attention towards other teachers, other schools and other communities. Travelling is the mechanism. People are the subject.

You do not have to leave before you can create change

When asked what he would tell a 15-year-old who wants to improve their community, Francis does not begin by recommending a particular technology, university or career.

He tells them that they do not first have to leave for a big city or another country before they can become useful to the place where they grew up. The starting point is more personal: What do you care about? What comes naturally to you? What abilities or talents do you have? And where do those things meet a real problem in your community?

For a young person the starting point might be technology, for another sport, agriculture, art or a vocational skill. What matters is the connection between personal motivation and a meaningful problem.

This advice captures much of Francis’s own journey. He did not follow the career he originally imagined. He moved through uncertainty, limited resources, different jobs, schools and countries. His direction emerged gradually as experiences started connecting.

Innovation begins with learning

Innovation careers do not always begin with a clear vision. Sometimes they begin with learning to pay attention. Across this interview series, innovators have approached the future from very different directions. Some begin with technology, some with entrepreneurship, systems, creativity or better ways of framing problems. Francis Bizoza brings the conversation back to something more fundamental.

Innovation begins when people learn to see what is around them differently. It can happen when a reluctant university student encounters an inspiring teacher, when a rural school turns an unfinished building into a learning project, when scarcity encourages a community to use knowledge it already possesses, or when children thousands of kilometres apart discover that each of them has something worth teaching the other.

Artificial intelligence will undoubtedly change education, but Francis’s story suggests that the most important question will remain human: what are we trying to help people become capable of doing?

Better technology can expand access to knowledge. It can connect people, translate languages, generate materials and make previously scarce resources widely available. But learning still requires curiosity, judgment, confidence and the willingness to encounter people whose experiences differ from our own.

Perhaps this is also where Francis’s childhood connects most clearly with the work he does today. He grew up moving between schools and communities and eventually discovered a profession he had never intended to enter. Now he travels deliberately, creating connections between places that might otherwise remain far apart. His journey suggests a simple but important principle: innovation does not begin with knowing the answer. It begins with being willing to learn.

About Francis Bizoza

Francis Bizoza Bigirimana, widely known as The African Travelling Teacher, is an Ugandan educator, education innovator and Pan-African advocate. He is a graduate of Makerere University and an alumnus of the African Leadership Academy’s Master Teacher Programme. His work combines teacher development, project-based and context-responsive learning, storytelling, global citizenship and the use of appropriate technologies in underserved educational settings.

Francis has also worked with Learning Equality and participated in the MIT Solve LEAP programme. In 2024, he was presented as a keynote speaker at eLearning Africa, where his work was highlighted for connecting African educators, strengthening teacher development and promoting locally relevant approaches to education.

Through The African Travelling Teacher, he travels to schools and communities, particularly in underserved areas, to document teachers’ work, engage learners in practical projects, share stories and connect educators with wider learning networks. He travels by road to intentionally understand what Africa truly is, appreciate its beauty, and recognize its great natural potential to showcase it to the world.

Follow Francis and The African Travelling Teacher

Website: https://theafricantravellingteacher.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheAfricanTravellingTeacher
LinkedIn: The African Travelling Teacher / Francis Bizoza Bigirimana

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