AI Literacy and Institutional Governance Response among Leaders in Private Higher Education

Abstract

Artificial intelligence tools are already in daily use across Zambia's private higher education institutions, yet little is known about whether the leaders responsible for governing that use are equipped to do so, or whether their institutions have built the structures to support them. This paper reports findings from a sequential exploratory mixed-methods study examining governance-level AI literacy and institutional AI response among strategic leaders across Zambia's twelve Tier 1 private universities. A structured questionnaire completed by one hundred governance-role staff was combined with semi-structured interviews conducted with twelve strategic leaders purposively drawn from five institutions, and the two strands were integrated using the Technology Acceptance Model as an interpretive lens. The study finds that governance-level AI literacy, the capacity to evaluate, question, and be accountable for AI's institutional use rather than simply operate the tools, is markedly underdeveloped among leaders regardless of seniority or academic qualification, and that this deficit is mirrored, and compounded, by an almost total absence of formal institutional AI governance: defined strategies, adoption procedures, and ethical safeguards are the exception rather than the rule. Leaders consistently recognise AI's strategic importance in principle while lacking the specific capacity to govern it in practice, a gap this paper argues is structural rather than personal, rooted in professional formation systems that did not anticipate AI governance as a leadership competency. The findings carry direct implications for institutional capacity-building, sector regulation, and national policy, and this paper's originality lies in providing the first empirically grounded account of the AI-literacy-to-governance pathway, and its breakdown, within Africa's private higher education sector.