Balancing Promise and Peril: Artificial Intelligence and Green Technology for Education 4.0 in Sub‐Saharan Africa to Achieve SDG ‐4

ABSTRACT Sub‐Saharan Africa continues to face challenges in achieving Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG‐4), especially in ensuring quality and equitable education amid rapid technological change. The rise of Education 4.0 highlights the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Green Technology (Greentech) to drive innovation and sustainability in learning systems. Yet, their integration in the region remains limited. Hence, this study explores the integration of AI and Greentech as transformative tools for Education 4.0 in Sub‐Saharan Africa, aimed at achieving SDG‐4. Focusing on the period from 2020 to 2024, it examines how these technologies can promote innovation, equity, and sustainability within higher education systems. The methodologies employed include country and year fixed effect model as benchmark, Permutation (randomization) inference as finite‐sample inferential tool, and Leave‐one‐country‐out sensitivity analysis as credibility to small‐N sample analysis. The findings revealed that, within countries, improvements in AI are more consistently associated with increases in the Education 4.0 dimension capturing digital learning infrastructure and technology‐enabled processes than with the Education 4.0 dimension reflecting slower‐moving educational stocks. Furthermore, Greentech shows weaker and more context‐dependent associations, and the moderation effect of AI in relation to Greentech does not exhibit stable complementarity across the sample. These patterns persist under permutation testing and sensitivity checks, thus suggesting that the observed associations are unlikely to arise by chance but are conditional on national context. Moreover, higher levels of AI are associated with greater rural–urban inequality in higher education attainment, a relationship moderated by government education spending. These findings highlight that AI aligns more with digital education dimensions than with foundational education stocks. Similarly, the importance of institutional quality and inclusive policy design for ensuring that technological progress supports equitable education outcomes in developing regions.