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| Panel Session at the Healing Digital Futures: AI and Mental Health Conference, which happened in Abuja on October 13, 2026 |
On October 13, 2026, I represented Shades of Us at the Healing Digital Futures: AI and Mental Health Conference, organised by Digital Rights and Mental Health Initiative (DRMHI) and HumAngle. The conference was hinged on a question we do not often ask, and for some people, do not even think about: what happens to our mental health in a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence?
The conversations explored the psychological cost of digital work, the responsibility of technology companies, online harm, and the need to protect human dignity as AI becomes part of everyday life.
One of the questions that stayed with me was raised during a presentation by Adeboye Adegoke, Principal at Luminate, who spoke in his personal capacity as a digital rights expert. Using a familiar Nigerian expression, ‘monkey dey work, baboon dey chop’, he asked us to consider who does the work and who benefits from it.
As he put it, “Participation is important for Africans. We need jobs, and we need representation. But participation is not justice.”
Africa is increasingly part of the global technology economy, supplying talent, data, languages, cultural knowledge, and labour. Yet the people doing some of the most psychologically demanding work behind AI systems often remain invisible in conversations about technological advancement.
We celebrate artificial intelligence for what it can do. We talk about its speed, efficiency, and potential to transform industries. We rarely ask what it takes from the people who help make it work.
Behind AI are workers who label data, transcribe audio, annotate images, and moderate content. Some repeatedly encounter graphic violence, child sexual abuse, rape, self-harm, and other disturbing material so that platforms can identify and remove harmful content.
During the session on protecting the digital workforce, participants shared personal experiences of doing this work; we heard from Tauheed Tayo Yakubu, a Customer Service Specialist and Content Moderator with experience working across Nigeria and Kenya; Adebowale Abdulquadri Sodeeq, a content moderator, microbiology graduate, and AI annotator with experience on AI training platforms; and Isah Ismaila, an award-winning investigative journalist with HumAngle whose reporting focuses on vulnerable communities, conflict, displacement, governance, and social justice. And Kauna Malgwi, Founder of the Digital Rights and Mental Health Initiative (DRMHI), moderated the session.
One speaker described the difficulty of carrying the psychological burden of content moderation without having anyone to talk to about the experience. The isolation affected personal relationships, while the nature of the work made it difficult to explain what they were going through.
Another speaker, an investigative journalist, spoke about the emotional strain of investigating cases involving child sexual abuse and repeatedly encountering graphic images. They raised the need to recognise mental health challenges as an occupational hazard.
A third speaker described working in data annotation, transcription, and labelling for as long as 12 hours at a stretch. They also spoke about being exposed to disturbing material that had not been disclosed during the assessment stage, as well as concerns about unequal pay and workers being laid off without payment for completed tasks.
These experiences raise questions about the responsibilities of employers and the companies that benefit from this work. What protections exist for workers who are repeatedly exposed to disturbing material? What happens when the work affects their sleep, relationships, and ability to function outside the workplace? Who can they approach when they need help?
During his presentation, Adeboye challenged the expectation that workers should simply endure harmful conditions. His position was clear: “We cannot keep asking workers to remain resilient when safe working conditions are not guaranteed.”
This is a critical point. Workers should not have to demonstrate extraordinary resilience to survive working conditions that organisations have a responsibility to make safer.
The conference also raised questions about the distribution of economic value in the technology industry.
African workers contribute to systems that generate enormous value, but their contributions do not always translate into fair compensation, secure employment, or meaningful ownership. Outsourcing can make accountability difficult to establish, particularly when the big tech companies benefiting from the work operate through several layers of contractors.
Adeboye asked a question that should remain central to discussions about AI governance: “Who works? Who profits? Who bears the cost?”
These are questions of economic justice as much as they are questions of technology.
African participation in the global AI economy should create opportunities for decent work, research, innovation, and ownership. It should also protect workers from exploitation and ensure that the people who create value have a fair share in its benefits.
As Adeboye argued, “Those who create value should have the power to share it.”
This requires more than celebrating the number of Africans employed in the technology sector. It requires examining their working conditions, the value of their contributions, their bargaining power, and the opportunities available to them beyond low-paid or precarious work.
It also requires investing in African researchers and innovators, protecting the value of African languages and cultural knowledge, strengthening workers' rights, and ensuring that accountability extends to the companies that commission and profit from outsourced labour.
The second panel explored the human cost of artificial intelligence and the conditions required for psychological safety. Speakers from psychology, journalism, and technology advocacy examined online harm, the circulation of intimate images without consent, and the challenges of holding digital platforms accountable.
The panel featured Kauna Malgwi, Founder of the Digital Rights and Mental Health Initiative (DRMHI); Chioma Agwuegbo, Executive Director of TechHerNG and women’s rights advocate; and Hauwa Shaffii Nuhu, conflict journalist and Managing Editor at HumAngle. Samuel A. Jinadu, a Clinical Psychologist with over 15 years of experience in mental health, trauma, stress management, and research, also joined the panel. The discussion was moderated by Angela Umoru-David, Programme Director at HumAngle.
Chioma Agwuegbo shared the account of a girl whose intimate images were circulated across Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and Telegram. According to the account shared during the panel, the images could be taken down from some platforms because of existing partnerships, but Telegram proved much more difficult to engage.
The experience also affected the person supporting the survivor, who stayed awake with her to help prevent her from dying by suicide. This is an important part of the conversation about digital harm. The consequences extend beyond the person directly affected, placing an emotional burden on those who step in to help.
The differences in how platforms respond to reports of abuse raise questions about their responsibility to survivors. Why should access to effective content removal depend on whether an organisation has a partnership with a platform? What happens to people who do not have access to these networks? And why should survivors and their supporters have to navigate complicated processes while harmful content continues to circulate?
“Technology companies must take responsibility for the platforms they operate and the harm that occurs through them,” Chioma emphasized. Survivors need accessible reporting mechanisms, timely action, and effective remedies. The burden of responding to abuse cannot continue to fall primarily on those who experience it and the people who support them.
Kauna Malgwi raised another important concern about the limits of technological safeguards and the role of human judgement. As she put it, “Humans will always find a way to escape the guardrails that are used to curb some of the excesses of AI and digital media.”
This observation challenges the assumption that technological safeguards alone can prevent harm. Digital platforms operate within changing social contexts, and people continue to find ways around the systems designed to regulate their behaviour. Take how ‘unalive’, ‘grape’, ‘self delete’, and ‘corn’ have become the way to avoid being flagged for using the right words: murder, rape, suicide, and porn, respectively. Companies must therefore examine how their safeguards work in practice, respond to emerging forms of abuse, and take responsibility when their policies and systems fail.
Malgwi also spoke about Meta's refusal to change certain policies after concerns had been raised, citing its purportedly global policies. This raises a difficult question for African users: whose realities determine how global platforms operate, and what happens when those policies fail to account for local contexts?
A policy does not become adequate simply because a company applies it globally. Meta must be willing to examine the consequences of its decisions and respond to legitimate concerns about how its policies affect users. Global reach should come with accountability, not provide a reason to dismiss calls for change.
Hauwa Shaffi Nuhu raised concerns about the information that informs artificial intelligence and the consequences of relying on existing digital representations. She noted, “AI relies on patterns that already exist. It creates realities of only those that exist in the digital space.”
This matters for African societies, whose languages, cultures, and lived experiences are not always adequately represented in digital spaces. If AI systems rely on existing information, gaps in that information can influence what these systems recognise, reproduce, and overlook.
The question is who gets to shape the information used to build these systems and whose experiences are left out. African languages, knowledge, and cultural experiences must be represented fairly, and the people whose data and knowledge contribute to technological development must have a say in how they are used.
Hauwa also spoke about the psychological demands of journalism, including the experience of having to remember disturbing images that cannot be shared because of safeguarding policies. Her contribution reinforced the need to recognise the mental health implications of working with graphic content, whether in journalism, content moderation, or other forms of digital work.
Samuel A. Jinadu emphasized that these conversations must lead to accountability. Governments need to understand the forms of harm that digital platforms facilitate and establish effective mechanisms for protecting citizens. Technology companies must explain how they respond to reports of abuse, address gaps in their safeguards, and provide accessible routes for redress.
The responsibility cannot be shifted to users, survivors, or civil society organisations alone. Meta, Facebook, TikTok, and Telegram must answer for the decisions, policies, and systems through which people experience digital harm. Their responsibility includes taking reports seriously, responding to evidence, and ensuring that people have meaningful ways to seek protection.
As artificial intelligence becomes more deeply embedded in everyday life, we must ask not only what these systems can do, but also who they serve, whose experiences they represent, and who is held accountable when they cause harm.
Another important lesson from the conference was the need to take the psychological effects of digital work seriously.
Workers may struggle to discuss their experiences because of confidentiality requirements, fear of losing their jobs, or concern that family and friends will not understand. Repeated exposure to disturbing material can also affect how people respond emotionally to situations outside work.
Organisations must therefore provide appropriate psychological support, transparent employment terms, reasonable workloads, and safe channels for reporting concerns. Workers should know what their jobs involve before accepting them and should have access to support without fear of punishment.
As the discussions demonstrated, support services matter, but they cannot replace changes to the conditions causing harm. Companies must address the sources of psychological distress rather than expect workers to manage the consequences on their own.
Governments also have a responsibility to protect citizens in an increasingly digital society. This requires a better understanding of online harm, personal data protection, technology-facilitated abuse, and the conditions under which digital labour is performed.
One of the questions I raised during the conference was: How can we collaborate to get information to the communities?
At Shades of Us, storytelling and community engagement are central to how we approach development issues. I am interested in how we can make conversations about AI, digital rights, and mental health accessible to people whose lives are increasingly shaped by technology but who may not be included in policy and industry discussions.
How do we help young people understand the implications of AI for their privacy and mental health? How do we equip parents, workers, and communities with information about online harm and where to seek help? How do we ensure that the people most affected by these issues can contribute to the solutions?
Film, facilitated dialogue, and community-based communication, as we do with our Mobile Cinema Approach, can help bring these conversations closer to people. They can create opportunities to share experiences, ask questions, and examine how technology affects everyday life.
This work requires collaboration among media organisations, civil society organisations, technology experts, mental health professionals, educators, and community leaders. It also requires us to listen to communities and develop communication approaches that respond to their realities.
The conversation about AI and mental health must extend beyond conference rooms. It must reach the people doing the work, the people using the technology, and those dealing with the consequences of its misuse.
The conference also featured the launch of the Mental Health Community of Care and Peer Support Training, reinforcing the importance of support systems for people experiencing psychological distress.
Care must be part of how we think about technological development. It must inform employment conditions, platform policies, government regulation, and the support available to people experiencing harm.
The questions raised throughout the conference remain important: who does the work, who benefits, who bears the cost, and who is responsible when people are harmed? Africa's future in artificial intelligence must include the power to shape the systems we contribute to building. This means investing in African innovation, strengthening workers' rights, ensuring fair value for African languages and knowledge, and creating pathways into higher-value work and decision-making. It also means recognising mental health as part of the conversation about economic justice, digital rights, and human dignity.
As the conference came to an end, we moved into sessions focused on decompressing from what had been a heavy day of conversations about AI, psychological safety, digital harm, and the experiences of people working behind the technology. The activities included individual and group therapy, painting, knitting, games, beading, and other creative exercises. These sessions created room for participants to pause, engage with one another differently, and process some of the difficult issues raised throughout the day.
The activities were a reminder that conversations about mental health must also make room for care and support. After listening to accounts of psychological distress, exposure to disturbing content, and the emotional consequences of digital harm, participants had an opportunity to step away from the discussions and engage in activities centred on their well-being.
It was a fitting close to a conference that asked us to consider the human cost of technological advancement. As we discuss the systems we build, the content we consume, and the people whose labour sustains our digital lives, we must also pay attention to the people carrying the emotional weight of these experiences.
The conference left me thinking about the people whose labour makes digital spaces safer for others, even when those same people are not adequately protected. We cannot continue to celebrate technological progress while overlooking the human experiences behind it.
The future cannot call itself intelligent if it has no room for humanity.
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