The Loneliness Epidemic: What Screens Are Doing to Kenya's Children

My nephew is 14. He has 847 TikTok followers and a WhatsApp contact list that runs to 340 names. If you asked him right now to call someone — not text, not DM, but actually call — someone who would listen to him talk for an hour about something that was genuinely bothering him, he would struggle to name three people.

This is not a Kenya-specific problem, but it is a Kenya-specific crisis — because Kenya does not have the mental health infrastructure to catch a generation that is falling into loneliness at a scale we have never seen before. In the United States and United Kingdom, the loneliness epidemic is at least being named and debated. In Kenya, we are still telling children to "be grateful" and "pray more" when they express isolation.

The Nation Lifestyle team this week published reporting that confirmed what many teachers and school counsellors have been seeing anecdotally for years: Kenya's urban children are growing up with phones that have hundreds of contacts but genuinely nobody to call. Rural children, who lack even the digital connections, are often even more isolated. Across both groups, rates of adolescent depression and anxiety that have been documented in the small number of formal studies conducted in Kenya are alarming — and the country has approximately one psychiatrist for every 200,000 people.

Parents shoulder some responsibility. The decision to hand an 8-year-old a smartphone with unrestricted internet access — a decision made by millions of Kenyan families out of a combination of love, busyness and the entirely understandable fear that their child will be left behind if they are not connected — is one whose long-term consequences we are only now beginning to understand.

But parents are not the primary policy actor here. The government is. And the government has no coherent youth mental health strategy, no school counselling programme that reaches more than a tiny fraction of students, and no regulatory framework for the social media platforms that are shaping Kenyan childhoods more profoundly than any school curriculum. This needs to change. Now, not after the 2027 election.