<p>Education-Centered Critical Policy Analysis of AI: Ghana's AI Strategy as a Case</p>

National AI strategies are increasingly analyzed for their attention to governance, workforce development, innovation, and competitiveness, but less is known about how they frame education as a sector with its own pedagogical, cultural, ethical, and implementation demands. This study addresses this gap by developing and applying an Education-Centered AI Policy Framework to critically analyze Ghana's National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, 2025-2035. Using critical qualitative policy document analysis, we deductively examined the strategy through the six components of the Education-Centered AI Policy Framework. The findings show that Ghana's strategy is ambitious and timely, especially in its emphasis on AI literacy, youth skills, TVET, workforce readiness, rural outreach, local language data, inclusion, and responsible AI governance. However, the education agenda is stronger on national AI readiness than on school-level implementation. Teacher agency, pre-service teacher education, curriculum progression, assessment guidance, AI disclosure, multilingual pedagogy, culturally responsive AI use, child-centered safeguards, and participatory governance remain underdeveloped. The analysis also identifies document-level concerns, including apparent AI-styled visual content without visible disclosure and a mismatch between the strategy's vision and mission figure and the related textual explanation, raising questions about the document's own transparency, coherence, and modeling of responsible AI communication. We argue that Ghana needs a sector-specific, education-centered AI policy and implementation pathway that includes key education stakeholders and connects workforce readiness with teacher preparation, curriculum reform, assessment redesign, learner protection, infrastructure, local language instruction, culturally responsive pedagogy, locally responsive AI tools, and participatory governance.