Artificial Intelligence in Ethiopian Higher Education: A Bibliometric Analysis of Research Trends, Systemic Adoption Barriers, and Policy-Infrastructure Disconnects

The rapid ascent of artificial intelligence is transforming higher education globally, yet adoption in Sub-Saharan Africa remains critically understudied. Ethiopia presents a compelling paradox: its ambitious National Artificial Intelligence Policy (2024) positions AI as central to national development, yet the country ranks among the world's lowest in AI readiness, creating a profound mismatch between policy vision and infrastructural reality. This study systematically investigates AI research trends, systemic adoption barriers, and policy-implementation disconnects in Ethiopian higher education using a mixed-methods bibliometric-synthesis design. We analyzed academic publications indexed in Scopus and Web of Science (2000–2026) combined with qualitative thematic analysis of full-text articles and policy documents, employing VOSviewer and Biblioshiny for bibliometric mapping and inductive thematic coding across infrastructure, pedagogy, language, and human-capacity dimensions. Results reveal that Ethiopian AI scholarly output has sharply increased after 2023, indicating nascent scholarly engagement rather than systemic adoption. Applying the UTAUT framework, we identify an "adoption paradox": high performance expectancy coexists with critically weak facilitating conditions; unreliable electricity, limited connectivity, prohibitive hardware costs (2–3× global prices), and inadequate teacher training. Linguistic challenges are prominent, with 55.6% of students demanding local language support. We demonstrate significant disconnects between the National AI Policy and institutional realities across infrastructure, data management, and ethics governance. We conclude that adoption barriers are rooted in systemic socio-economic factors and implementation failures, risk exacerbating the "Matthew Effect" by advantaging well-resourced urban universities. We provide policy recommendations and propose an extended UTAUT framework incorporating infrastructure and linguistic capacity for Global South higher education contexts.