Hello!
I am Temitayo Akere, the founder of AI Afriq.
I am a researcher and Master’s student in Governance and Policy Studies at Obafemi Awolowo University. My academic background began in Literature in English, but my curiosity has always extended beyond the boundaries of a single discipline. I have long been interested in people: how we think, how we behave, how our surroundings shape us, and what happens when something in that environment begins to change.
Listening to people
One of the places where I have had the opportunity to see this up close is in my work as a Digital Mental Health Moderator.
I spend time in online spaces supporting people who come in carrying very real struggles. Each month, I chat with between about 80 and 100 people, sometimes more, from different backgrounds and age groups, although many are young people. Some are dealing with severe loneliness or social anxiety. Some find it difficult to form or maintain relationships. Some have experienced grooming, parental neglect or difficult childhoods. Others are trying to make sense of what happened when they were introduced to the digital world very early and without much supervision.
The work has taught me something I could not have learned from simply reading about these issues. People reveal themselves in the details. Sometimes it is in the way someone describes spending hours online because there is nowhere else they feel wanted. Sometimes it is a young person struggling to connect with people in real life after growing up with much of their social world mediated by screens.
I listen. I respond. I support them through those conversations. And over time, I began to notice how often technology was sitting somewhere in the background of the stories people were telling me.
Before AI
My interest in mental health began long before AI Afriq. In 2018, I pursued an investigative story on people living with mental illness who were left to roam the streets of Lagos. I wanted to understand what was happening to them, but also what their situation revealed about the people, families and systems around them.
That experience stayed with me. It was one of my earliest encounters with the questions that continue to shape my work: what happens when human vulnerability meets inadequate systems of care, and what responsibilities do individuals, institutions and society have towards those affected?
From Health to Ethics
Those questions gradually drew me towards broader questions of health, human wellbeing and ethics. I became interested in the principles and responsibilities that should guide decisions affecting people, particularly where vulnerability, care, dignity and emerging forms of intervention intersect.
This is where my interest in bioethics began to take shape. I became increasingly interested in the ethical dimensions of health and technological change, and in the questions that emerge when what we are capable of doing begins to outpace our understanding of what we ought to do.
Then Technology
Technology brought these questions into a much wider and more complicated space.
As digital technologies and artificial intelligence became increasingly embedded in everyday life, I began to look beyond the technology itself and towards its effects on human development, behaviour, relationships, health and society. I became particularly interested in what happens when technologies designed to assist us begin to influence how we think, learn, communicate, make decisions and relate to one another.
This has become the intellectual space from which I now work: at the intersection of technology, health, ethics and governance, with a particular interest in the human consequences of technological change.
Why AI Afriq
AI Afriq grew from this trajectory.
It is my attempt to create a space for researching questions that are often developing faster than the evidence, policy and ethical frameworks needed to understand them. The work currently spans questions around childhood and digital engagement, human attention, AI and culture, digital behaviour, health, emerging technologies and their governance.
Nigeria is the starting point. Africa provides the wider context.
I am interested in research that takes human experience seriously, but also moves beyond observation to ask what these changes mean for institutions, policy and the ethical frameworks through which technological development is understood and governed.
For now, I conduct the research, interviews, fieldwork, writing, editing and publishing myself. But AI Afriq is being built with a larger ambition in mind: to grow into an interdisciplinary research hub bringing together different forms of expertise to examine how technological advancement is reshaping human life.
And at the centre of it is still the question that first drew me to this work: what happens to people when the systems around them change?