By Daniel Nduka Okonkwo
What if the solitude that once gave a generation time to think, experiment, and build is disappearing just when Africa needs it most? Many of the technology pioneers who transformed the modern world grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, in an era when boredom was unavoidable, entertainment was limited, phones were not intelligent, and a child could spend hours alone with a book, a broken radio, a computer, or simply an idea. That solitude was not necessarily loneliness, but it created something that today’s permanently connected world is quietly destroying, uninterrupted time to think. Today, a young African can hold in one hand a device with access to virtually all the knowledge humanity has accumulated and still spend five hours scrolling through gossip, meaningless arguments, recycled videos, and digital noise, burning data without gaining an insight, acquiring a skill, or creating anything.
The tragedy is not that Africa’s young people lack technology; it is that millions have not been shown what technology can make of them. The smartphone that consumes a young person’s attention can also become a laboratory, a classroom, a newsroom, a business center,e and a gateway to the global economy. Artificial intelligence has lowered the barriers even further. A child with curiosity, internet access, mentorship, and determination can now learn, design, code, investigate, invent, and build things that once required laboratories, institutions, and enormous capital. So the question Africa must confront is no longer whether its young people have potential. They do. The question is whether parents, educators, entrepreneurs, and political leaders will recognise that potential early enough to turn digital consumption into digital creation. Parents are their children’s first mentors; African industries must become their training grounds; and today’s leaders must stop measuring young people by the certificates they possess and start measuring them by the problems they can solve. Africa does not need every brilliant child to leave the continent, obtain an expensive foreign education, and return home to wait for a job secured through parental connections. It needs an ecosystem that can discover genius where it lives, in a village, a market, a crowded compound, a secondary school classroom, or in the hands of a child holding an ordinary smartphone. Profiles International Human Rights Advocate’s investigations and observations point to a disturbing conclusion, that Africa’s greatest shortage may not be talent, technology, or even money, but leadership capable of understanding what a young person can become in the digital age. The continent has the minds to fly; what has been missing are the people willing to stop clipping their wings. And in the age of artificial intelligence, Africa may be only one idea, one mentor, one opportunity, or one determined young person with a computer, away from astonishing the world.
Nowhere is Africa’s digital talent more visible today than in entertainment. A new generation of young African content creators is dominating the global entertainment landscape, leveraging short-form comedy, lifestyle vlogging, podcasting, and viral dance trends to build audiences that rival those of established Hollywood stars. Khaby Lame, born in Senegal and raised in Italy, became the most followed creator on TikTok in the world through his signature silent, deadpan reactions to overly complicated life hacks. Elsa Majimbo of Kenya rose to fame during the lockdown era with her iconic potato chip monologues and has since evolved into a luxury fashion and lifestyle icon working with major global brands. In Nigeria, Maryam Apaokagi, known online as Taaooma, has become one of West Africa’s biggest digital comedians through multi-character skits that hilariously dissect African family dynamics, while Pellar has become a sensation on TikTok, dominating livestreaming and viral skits and holding records for some of the most-watched livestreams on the continent. Beyond comedy, storytellers such as Wode Maya of Ghana travel the continent highlighting positive developments, technological innovation, and African success stories, while Tayo Aina produces cinematic travel and real estate content that is reshaping how the world views African cities, and Eniola Olanrewaju, known as Korty Eo, is celebrated for her raw, indie style filmmaking and deep conversational interviews with everyday citizens and global superstars alike. Jola Ayeye, known as Jollz, co hosts the podcast I Said What I Said, which shapes pop culture and millennial dialogue across the continent, while performers such as Rango Tenge Tenge of Uganda, Purplespeedy of Nigeria and the Triplets Ghetto Kids of Uganda, a troupe of young dancers whose street style performances have taken them to global stages including Britain’s Got Talent, have carried African creativity to audiences the continent’s traditional industries could never reach on their own.
These young Africans are doing remarkable work, and some of what they create is genuinely innovative. But their success also raises an uncomfortable question that this investigation keeps returning to. Content creation brings money to individual creators. Technology, built and owned, brings change to the world. Can the same energy, discipline, and global appeal that Africa’s content creators have demonstrated be redirected, even partially, into the harder, less glamorous work of building the software, platforms, and technical infrastructure that will define the next decade, rather than leaving Africa’s young people permanently positioned as performers on platforms owned and built somewhere else?
On a Friday night in one of the world’s great cities, the music is still pounding, the neon lights are still burning and the drinks are still being served, but something fundamental has quietly disappeared: people are no longer looking at one another. Around tables designed for conversation, faces are lit instead by the cold blue glow of smartphones. In bedrooms thousands of miles away, young people scroll through endless streams of human faces while lying alone in the dark. Somewhere between the dying dancefloor and the glowing screen, a new paradox of civilisation is taking shape. We have built a world capable of connecting almost everyone to everyone, yet millions of human beings are struggling to find one person they can truly call their own. The room is full, and somehow it feels empty. Somewhere else, perhaps in Lagos, London, Nairobi, New York, or Los Angeles, a young person lies awake at three in the morning, staring into the same blue light, not at another human being, but at an artificial intelligence chatbot that never gets tired, never becomes irritated, and never says it is too busy to talk. The machine listens. It responds. It remembers. It simulates affection. And for a lonely human being, that can feel remarkably close to companionship.
The World Health Organization has now given this paradox a frightening scale. Its Commission on Social Connection, co-chaired by former United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and African Union Youth Envoy Chido Mpemba, released a flagship report in mid 2025 estimating that one in six people worldwide experience loneliness. Among adolescents and young adults, the figure rises to roughly one in five, and in low-income countries, it climbs close to one in four, more than double the rate recorded in wealthier nations. This is no longer simply a story about people who are shy, unmarried, elderly, or socially awkward. It is a story about how modern societies are being organised, about cities, work, technology, economics, family structures, public spaces, and the attention economy. And increasingly, it is a story about artificial intelligence.
Loneliness is frequently misunderstood because it is confused with physical isolation. A person can live alone and be perfectly content, while another can sit in a crowded stadium surrounded by thousands of people and feel an unbearable sense of isolation. The WHO defines loneliness as the painful gap between the social connections a person has and those they want or need. Social isolation is different. It refers to the objective lack of sufficient relationships and interaction. That distinction matters because the crisis confronting modern society is not simply that people are spending more time alone. It is that too many people no longer feel known. They have followers but few friends, contacts but few confidants, notifications but little intimacy, and conversations but little belonging.
The consequences are not merely emotional. The WHO estimates that loneliness and social isolation are linked to approximately eight hundred and seventy-one thousand deaths every year, roughly one hundred deaths every hour, and has connected social disconnection to higher risks of cardiovascular disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, depression, anxiety, and dementia. Earlier work from the United States Surgeon General’s office had already compared the mortality risk of chronic loneliness to smoking as many as fifteen cigarettes a day. That comparison should not be read as saying loneliness literally equals smoking. It illustrates the scale of the association between weak social connections and premature death, placing social disconnection in the same tier of public health emergencies as tobacco, alcohol, and air pollution. We have spent decades treating smoking as an emergency worth taxing, regulating, and warning against on every packet. Social disconnection has received almost none of that urgency, despite a comparable body count.
We did not simply become lonely. We redesigned the structures around us in ways that made loneliness easier to fall into and harder to climb out of. The easy explanation is to blame smartphones. It is attractive, but it is incomplete. Technology did not invent loneliness. Human beings have always experienced rejection, grief, abandonment, and solitude. What has changed is the architecture surrounding human relationships. Extended families have weakened in many societies. Urban populations have exploded. People move away from home for education and employment. Remote work has removed millions of informal workplace interactions. Gig work can turn colleagues into competitors who may never meet in person. Public gathering spaces disappear beneath expensive real estate. Community organisations struggle for members and funding. Religious and civic participation is shifting. In many cities, economic pressure leaves people with neither the money nor the time required to maintain a social life.
The WHO itself identifies low income, living alone, inadequate community infrastructure, major life changes, and harmful patterns of digital media use among the factors associated with loneliness and social isolation. This is why calling loneliness a personal failure is intellectually lazy. Sometimes the individual is not broken. The environment around them is. We have built cities where a person can spend an entire day without speaking meaningfully to another human being, employment systems where colleagues can work together for months without sharing a room, and digital platforms that measure human attention in seconds and sell it to the highest bidder. Then we act surprised when people become disconnected.
For generations, bars, clubs, restaurants, cafes, sporting venues, and neighbourhood gathering places were more than businesses; they were social infrastructure, giving strangers somewhere to meet and lonely people a chance to encounter somebody who might eventually become a friend, a partner, a colleague, or a member of their community. But social infrastructure costs money to maintain in the modern economy. Rent, security, and transport all rise while disposable income falls. Younger generations are drinking less alcohol for health reasons, cutting into the margins that once subsidised these gathering spaces, and digital entertainment is available from the bedroom for almost nothing. It would be premature to blame loneliness alone for the decline of nightlife, since inflation, regulation, and shifting consumer preferences all play a part, but the deeper question remains: what happens to businesses whose underlying product is human togetherness when a society becomes less capable of getting together? A nightclub does not merely sell alcohol and music; at its best, it sells an opportunity for human encounter, just as a cafe sells belonging alongside coffee, a stadium sells collective emotion alongside a match, and a neighbourhood market sells familiarity alongside its goods. When those spaces disappear, something more valuable than commerce disappears with them.
And now artificial intelligence has arrived, precisely when the human infrastructure for connection is weakest. Chatbots such as Character.AI and Replika can provide conversation at any hour. They do not need to sleep. They do not demand reciprocity. They do not cancel plans. They do not judge a person for reaching out at three in the morning. For someone experiencing loneliness, that accessibility can be extraordinarily attractive, and there is a legitimate case for technology helping people. Assistive AI integrations have been used in care facilities to ease anxiety and depression among older adults, and researchers see potential for such tools to help introverted individuals or children practise social skills.
But there is a dangerous distinction between using technology as a bridge back to human connection and using it as a replacement for human connection altogether, and that distinction is becoming harder to hold onto. Research out of Stanford University into AI companion platforms has raised serious questions about psychological well-being and the degree to which heavy users substitute artificial companionship for real relationships. Stanford researchers examining widely used AI companion systems have also flagged concerning responses involving self-harm, violence, and sexual content surfacing in conversations with young users. The lesson is not that artificial intelligence is inherently harmful. It is loneliness that creates a uniquely vulnerable market. A lonely person is not merely looking for information; they are looking for recognition, and an algorithm trained on the patterns of millions of human conversations can now manufacture recognition at an industrial scale, twenty-four hours a day, at a price point far below therapy or a night out.
There is something psychologically powerful about a companion that is always available and almost infinitely accommodating. Human relationships are difficult precisely because human beings are difficult. Friends disappoint us. Partners disagree with us. Parents misunderstand us. Colleagues irritate us. Neighbours invade our privacy. Real friendship requires negotiation, forgiveness, patience, and sacrifice. An artificial companion can remove much of that friction, and that can sound wonderful. It may also be quietly dangerous, because the very difficulties that make human relationships exhausting are often the same difficulties through which people develop empathy, patience, resilience, and social competence. A machine that always adapts to its user can become an extraordinarily comfortable environment, but comfort is not the same thing as connection. A person may spend hours talking to an AI and emerge feeling temporarily soothed while becoming steadily less willing to endure the uncertainty and vulnerability required to build something with another human being. That is the central question hanging over the AI companionship boom. Are these tools helping lonely people find their way back to society, or are we quietly building a society in which lonely people no longer feel they need to?
Even extraordinary wealth cannot purchase immunity from this condition, and one of the world’s richest men has said so publicly. Elon Musk, in a widely reported 2017 interview, spoke about the pain of being without a long-term companion, saying that going to sleep alone was what affected him most. The statement matters not because Musk is uniquely qualified to explain loneliness, but because it undercuts one of the most persistent myths about isolation, which is that money buys immunity from it. A person can own companies, private aircraft, houses, and extraordinary wealth and still want somebody beside them when the lights go out. Loneliness is democratic in the cruellest sense. It does not respect bank balances. It can live in a mansion or in a single rented room. It can affect a public figure surrounded by cameras and an unemployed graduate sitting alone at home. The wealthy can purchase privacy; they cannot purchase genuine belonging on demand. Musk himself has pointed to AI as a possible tool to help children and introverted people practise the social skills that build real friendships, an irony worth sitting with given how the same technology is accused of displacing those very skills in more vulnerable users.
For Africa, this crisis carries a particular and painful irony. Many African societies historically placed enormous value on extended family, neighbourhood relationships, communal celebrations, religious networks, informal associations, and shared public life. The old African idea was, in many respects, brutally simple: a person belonged to other people. The extended family was not merely a genealogical concept. It was childcare, elder care, emotional support, emergency finance, somewhere to sleep, someone to call, and a network of witnesses to one’s existence. Community functioned as medicine long before the word wellness entered the vocabulary of public health.
But Africa is urbanising faster than almost anywhere else on earth, and the African Union’s own Youth Envoy has warned that social isolation can affect anyone, anywhere, and that the continent must redefine the narrative around loneliness rather than treat it as someone else’s problem. A young Nigerian can grow up surrounded by cousins, neighbours, and extended family and then move to Abuja or Lagos for university or employment, arriving in a city where millions of people live physically close to one another but socially apart. Economic pressure and inflation accelerate rural to urban migration, and once there, young Nigerians face a particular strain, balancing the daily fight for economic survival against the slow erosion of the community structures that once carried previous generations through hardship. Rapid urbanisation, youth unemployment, and the breakdown of traditional communal safety nets are precisely the conditions the WHO associates with elevated risk of social disconnection, and low and middle-income regions already carry the heaviest share of the global loneliness burden. Africa is not immune to this crisis. In many ways, given the speed of its urban transformation, it may be one of the most consequential places in the world to watch it unfold.
None of this argues for switching off phones and pretending technology is the enemy. It argues for a harder, more honest reckoning with what has been quietly outsourced. Societies built the conditions that made loneliness so widespread through the design of cities, workplaces, economies, and digital platforms, and only societies willing to look honestly at that design can begin to reverse it. Africa still holds something the wealthier world has lost, a living memory of community as medicine, and if that memory can be married to the tools now available, the same technology accused of deepening isolation could become the bridge back to belonging. The task ahead is not to reject the digital age but to rebuild, deliberately, the human infrastructure it has quietly hollowed out.
Daniel Nduka Okonkwo is an investigative journalist, human rights advocate, and policy analyst based in Abuja, Nigeria. He is the publisher of Profiles International Human Rights Advocate, a platform focused on accountability journalism, governance reporting, and the documentation of human rights issues across Africa. His work examines the intersection of political power, institutional accountability, systemic failure, and the human impact of corruption, with particular focus on Nigeria and the wider African continent.
Okonkwo’s reporting and analysis have been published in Sahara Reporters, African Defence Forum, Daily Trust, Vanguard, Daily Intel, Opinion Nigeria, African Angle, Local Newsbreak, and other international media outlets. His work is driven by a commitment to transparency, democratic governance, and justice. He also collaborates with Daniels Entertainment on human rights initiatives, extending his advocacy beyond traditional journalism into broader public engagement.
He is based in Abuja, Nigeria, and can be reached at dan.okonkwo.73@gmail.com.
