OpenAI Expands Education for Countries Program

OpenAI has added Singapore to its OpenAI education program, Education for Countries, and shared early results from the first cohort at the Education World Forum in London. The initiative, launched at Davos earlier this year, now spans nine countries and is built on ministry-level research partnerships rather than direct software distribution.

The founding cohort covers Estonia, Greece, Italy's CRUI, Slovakia, Trinidad and Tobago, Kazakhstan, the UAE, and Jordan. Each deployment runs across three components: evidence-based rollouts using OpenAI's Learning Outcomes Measurement Suite, localized access to ChatGPT, Codex, and the OpenAI API, and structured teacher training tied to national AI certifications.

How Education for Countries Is Structured

Every national rollout begins as a research partnership. The Learning Outcomes Measurement Suite tracks how AI affects student performance and teacher productivity, with findings committed to public release, giving governments data independent of vendor reporting.

Teacher enablement runs alongside tool access. Each country pairs its deployment with professional development, AI literacy programs, and builder events such as Estonia's Presidential Codex Hackathon, where more than 150 participants formed around 30 OpenAI-mentored teams to build classroom tools including a Maths Feedback Coach and an AI STEM Tutor.

Results Across the First Cohort

Kazakhstan produced the clearest numbers. A ChatGPT Edu deployment across all 20 regions trained more than 84,000 educators, with nine in ten reporting the tool improved their daily work. Within the opening month, 44,000 active educators submitted 1.5 million prompts.

Slovakia's university survey data shows nine in ten educators saving roughly five hours per week. A Ministry of Education team used Workspace Agents to redraft national teacher professional standards aligned to the country's AI competency framework, compressing months of policy work into hours.

In Jordan, over one million students and more than 100,000 teachers have used Siraj, an AI education assistant developed through a national initiative by the National Council for Future Technology. Estonia's rollout, co-developed with the AI Leap Foundation, the University of Tartu, and Stanford, now reaches more than 20,000 students and 4,600 teachers. Greece took a startup-focused route, with its OpenAI Accelerator selecting 21 companies from 240 applicants to develop homegrown AI talent.

Singapore Joins as the Program Looks Ahead

Singapore enters as the ninth participant, with OpenAI supporting the Ministry of Education and GovTech on personalized learning tools, including interactive mother tongue language instruction. According to the announcement, roughly 43% of ChatGPT usage among Singaporeans aged 18 to 24 already relates to studying.

The partnership adds a Singapore-specific OpenAI Academy chapter and Codex for Teachers hackathons designed around educator-led adoption. OpenAI will soon launch OpenAI Luminaries, an educator engagement track focused on co-designing classroom resources and circulating teacher-led approaches across participating countries. A second cohort will be announced before the end of 2026.

[Analysis] The program's most significant structural element for policymakers is its public research commitment. If the Learning Outcomes Measurement Suite delivers rigorous classroom data, it could give education ministries worldwide an evidence base to act on, rather than waiting years for independent academic studies to catch up with deployment timelines.