AWS is betting that a basketball game can help tackle a very serious problem: getting more children interested in maths.
The company announced on Wednesday that it will provide AI and cloud technology to Learn Fresh, the nonprofit behind NBA Math Hoops, as the programme expands to reach 10,000 students across five African countries by the end of 2027. In South Africa, the target is 1,000 students.
NBA Math Hoops is aimed at children aged 8 to 14 and turns maths into a competitive game. Students build fantasy basketball teams and use real NBA and WNBA player statistics to solve algebra problems. They also compete in local tournaments.
NBA Math Hoops
Learn Fresh has already spent three years piloting the programme in South Africa, Botswana and Mozambique, training more than 100 educators along the way. The next phase expands it into Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal and Egypt.
Why math, and why now
UNESCO estimates that nearly 90% of children aged 6 to 14 in Sub-Saharan Africa are not reaching minimum numeracy proficiency. That is a daunting gap to close, which makes the evidence behind NBA Math Hoops particularly interesting.
A randomised controlled trial by WestEd found that students gained the equivalent of four to five months of maths learning after spending just 17 to 24 hours with NBA Math Hoops.
The real challenge, then, is scaling the programme across borders, where languages, infrastructure and costs can vary dramatically from one country to the next.
What AWS is actually providing
The funding comes through AWS’s Education Equity Initiative, a $100 million commitment to education technology for underserved learners around the world.
The technology comes into play in several ways: Amazon Bedrock will adapt maths challenges to each student’s ability and pace, while Amazon Translate will help localise the content in English, Arabic, French and Swahili.
In addition, Amazon QuickSight will give Learn Fresh a clearer picture of how students are engaging with the programme and what they’re actually learning. The data will allow Learn Fresh to refine the programme while also giving funders and governments evidence of whether the approach is working.
For NBA Africa CEO Clare Akamanzi, basketball is the way in. “We believe basketball can be a powerful gateway to education, leadership and opportunity,” she said.
NBA Math Hoops is built around that very idea. The basketball is the hook, but the ambition goes considerably further. Learn Fresh chief mission officer Calvin Sibert says the organisation wants to take STEM education to a global scale.
“Man, this needs to be everywhere in the world,” he said during the media roundtable.
“So, it’s special to watch it happen, and for me to be the person that said it needs to be all over the world. Be careful what you wish for, because you’ll get your wish.”
How this works
Educators will go through structured training before taking NBA Math Hoops into classrooms and community programmes, with AWS-powered digital tools forming part of that process.
The first regional tournaments across the five countries are planned for the first half of 2027, with the longer-term ambition of connecting the programme to the Basketball Africa League Finals and a continental tournament by 2030.
Schools and community organisations interested in getting involved can register through Learn Fresh.
The announcement came on the same day as AWS’s Johannesburg keynote and its $1 billion Forward Deployed Engineering investment, both aimed firmly at the enterprise market. This partnership is a very different proposition.
The money involved is smaller and the audience is children rather than businesses, but there is still a business strategy underneath it. AWS gets another opportunity to put its technology into use across African markets, while Learn Fresh gets the technical muscle to scale a programme that would otherwise be expensive to expand.
And in this case, that partnership happens to involve basketball, maths and 10,000 kids.
