At the launch of Iris in Durban in August last year, government’s own news service reported the commitment that the AI humanoid tutor would be in every classroom in South Africa by the end of that October.
Eleven months past that deadline, five schools have one. They are Amangwe High, Mgidla Secondary, Ekuthuthukeni Secondary, George Caltex Primary and Intakemazolo Secondary, all in KwaZulu-Natal, and all running the robot on systems donated by the company that makes it.
Despite its public show of support, including as recently as earlier this month, the department of science, technology & innovation (DSTI) has put no money into the project at all.
“The department has not yet made any funding towards Iris,” said department spokeswoman Veronica Mohapeloa. “We support innovators in South Africa and the promotion of Stem education. As for Iris, we have not considered funding.”
Iris is a wheeled humanoid roughly the height of a primary school pupil, with a screen on its chest and speakers for a voice.
Teachers prompt it by keyboard or by speaking to it, and it answers pupils’ questions, explains concepts, helps with assessments and logs how a class is responding.
It works in all 11 official languages and is mapped to the South African curriculum from grade R to matric. The pitch is that it is an assistant, not a replacement – the robot does the marking and the repetition while the teacher teaches.
Endorsement, not investment
The science department attended the August 2025 launch, coordinated the KwaZulu-Natal education department’s attendance, and returned with the Technology Innovation Agency for this month’s event, where deputy science minister Nomalungelo Gina called Iris proof that South Africa could be “a producer, rather than merely a consumer, of advanced technologies”. That support is endorsement, not investment. The money behind Iris, so far, is almost entirely its founders’.
A full Iris installation would run to about R650 000 a school, founder Bonisiwe “Thandoh” Gumede said – R250 000 for the robot, plus 20 laptops integrated with it, a 65-inch smart television for the teacher, and the required cybersecurity and Wi-Fi. Her company, BSG and Technologies Services, donated the systems to the five schools now running it.
Scaled up, the numbers explain the silence. Equipping the robot alone in each of South Africa’s 22 381 public schools would cost about R5.6-billion. The full system would cost R14.5-billion.
Gumede says the DSTI “had asked to buy some Irises for some schools, but we’ve had no commitment about how many schools or when”. Told the department had confirmed it was not considering funding, she said: “No, they haven’t committed to anything at all as of yet. So everything has been out of pocket.”
In fairness to the DSTI, schooling is a provincial competence and the science department has no schools budget. But it was the department that convened the launches, and government’s own news service that carried the October deadline.
The department’s statement described the launch of a manufacturing plant, and other South African publications reported it this month as being one. Gumede has made it clear to TechCenral that it is not one – not yet, anyway.
Parts are cut at the company’s facility in India and shipped to Durban for assembly. “For the next two to three years, we will assemble this side while doing the training for building Iris locally,” she said. Full local production depends on capital the company does not have, for 3D printing and cutting machines. “It is only the capital that is delaying us. If we can get the money to set up a plant, we can localise even this year.”
Iris is a genuine collaboration with an Indian firm, a fact Gumede volunteers readily. A physics and maths teacher in KwaZulu-Natal, she taught herself to code in 2022 to build a marking and analysis tool, and won the Miss.Africa Digital seed-fund grand prize that year. She met the Kerala robotics firm MakerLabs at an embassy event in India in 2023. “They went crazy when they saw my software system,” she said. “We started building Iris together.”
The robot was publicly unveiled at a school in Kerala in March 2024, credited in Indian coverage to MakerLabs, before Gumede brought it home and translated it into South African languages. In India it has spread school by school, billed as Kerala’s and then Assam’s “first AI teacher” rather than at scale.
Does the hardware earn its price?
The international evidence is mixed on whether a physical robot is worth the premium. A meta analysis of 146 studies in Frontiers in Robotics and AI in March found that a robot working alongside a teacher produced a large learning gain, and one replacing the teacher none at all. Against an ordinary on-screen interface, the robot’s edge was slight, and the authors noted the novelty effect “typically fades quickly”.
Iris is positioned as a teacher’s aide, the role the research supports, and Gumede describes it as automating the work that overwhelmed her in a class of 285.
The cautionary tale is Finland’s Elias, the celebrated classroom robot that spoke 23 languages. It ran on SoftBank’s NAO, whose maker Aldebaran sold some 37 000 robots into 70 countries before entering receivership in June 2025, leaving buyers with unsupported hardware. Elias today is sold as an app. Support over a decade is the real test of a school robot, and Iris carries the same long tail of software, maintenance and spare parts.
Jobs, and a cheaper route
Gumede’s jobs claim rests on that same long tail. The projection of more than 20 000 posts over five years covers manufacturing, delivery, installation, maintenance and teaching with Iris. The company is training 637 people in robot-building, 300 of them provided by Inkosi Mkhwanazi, a KwaZulu-Natal traditional leader, at R9 500/year each, funded by sponsors. The course runs 18 months online followed by six months of hands-on training, after which those who pass are promised work at Dube TradePort.
There is a cheaper route to the same classrooms. Maski, the WhatsApp AI tutor from Bytefuse and Maskew Miller Longman, reached 100 000 users in six months on R55-million and no hardware at all.
The question the department’s endorsement leaves open is not whether Iris is clever. It is who, if anyone, will pay to put it in a classroom that cannot afford the teachers it already has. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media
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