Click to watchIn Nigeria, mental health is still caught between silence and stigma. Attempted suicide remains a crime, trauma is dismissed as weakness, and psychiatrists are scarce. For Aisha Bubah, this reality stopped being abstract in 2014 when a bomb tore through Kano and killed people close to her.
She was 22, just back from university in Ghana, when Boko Haram’s insurgency reached her doorstep. What began in 2009 as a wave of extremist attacks had by then exploded into one of Africa’s deadliest wars, displacing millions and eroding communities. Her own family pinballed between Borno and Kano as the violence spread—part of the same mass uprooting that left millions carrying invisible wounds.
What struck her wasn’t just the violence but the silence that ensued. “There was no language for what we were going through,” she recalls “People just told us to move on.” That absence of language became as damaging as the war itself: grief unnamed, trauma unacknowledged, and no shared vocabulary to make sense of it.
She had just returned home after completing her degree in Ghana when the Kano attack happened. That moment altered her path. Instead of pursuing a career in HR or banking, as her father had hoped, she chose counselling psychology. A master’s abroad followed. Her first formal role was in drug rehabilitation, one of the few structured mental health jobs available. But the crisis was much wider. In Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camps, where displacement compounded trauma, she began training teachers and health workers as lay counsellors. The idea was simple: if psychiatrists were scarce, equip trusted community figures to recognise warning signs, offer support, and connect people to care.
From this grew The Sunshine Series. Its model reflects the same logic as her own journey: where silence existed, create words; where specialists were absent, build local capacity; where stigma persisted, normalise conversation.
She still remembers one secondary school workshop in Kano. A teenage boy stood up after a session on depression and said, “I thought I was just lazy. I didn’t know it had a name.” For Aisha, it confirmed what the war had revealed: the crisis was not just about access to care but about finding the right words to even begin.
She still remembers one secondary school workshop in Kano. A teenage boy stood up after a session on depression and said, “I thought I was just lazy. I didn’t know it had a name.” For Aisha, it confirmed what the war had revealed: the crisis was not just about access to care but about finding the right words to even begin.
Turning experience into infrastructure
By January 2020, Bubah formalised her approach with The Sunshine Series, set up as a social enterprise: those who could pay subsidised care for those who could not. But revenue alone wasn’t enough, so she created a sister nonprofit, Idimma, to access grants—keeping both tied to the same mission of expanding mental health care.
Her biggest breakthrough came through radio. Market surveys confirmed what Nigerians already knew: radio is still the country’s most democratic medium, projected to reach over 130 million Nigerians by 2025. In rural areas—home to nearly 80% of the population—FM stations remain the most reliable channel for information, carrying health campaigns and political messaging in ways television and the internet cannot. Sunshine Series seized on that reality.
In 2022, the team launched Nigeria’s first mental health radio drama, airing 15-minute fictional stories drawn from real scenarios on stations like Capital FM, Kiss FM, and Rahama Radio. In one episode, a character wrestled with suicidal thoughts after a kidnapping. Each broadcast ended with information on the 112 emergency line, which Sunshine Series had helped the federal government integrate as Africa’s largest suicide prevention helpline. “This is something even developed countries haven’t fully done,” Bubah notes with pride.
The impact was immediate: whenever episodes aired, calls spiked, sometimes more than ten in a single airing. To reach younger, urban audiences, episodes were later archived on Spotify, but the contrast was clear. While Spotify counted 13.5 million daily streams in Nigeria by 2024, mostly among data-connected youth, radio still dominated reach in displaced and rural communities.
Sunshine Series also avoided the common trap of stopping at sensitisation. Every workshop was logged, feedback tracked, and teachers and nurses followed up to measure their real-world reach. “If one health worker is trained in a camp,” Bubah explains, “we know exactly how many people they see, what issues are recurring, and how to adjust the next training. That’s how scale happens.”
This discipline—pairing storytelling with data—has drawn national media attention and influenced policy. Beyond the 112 helpline and the 2023 Mental Health Law, Aisha now contributes through the National Mental Health Technical Working Group, created by the Federal Ministry of Health & Social Welfare in 2023. The group has delivered Nigeria’s first national mental health and suicide prevention policy, now being rolled out across all 36 states to improve access for more than 40 million people living with mental health conditions.
Fighting stigma, one faith at a time
In Nigeria, faith shapes nearly every aspect of life. The country is split almost evenly between Christians and Muslims, with over 70% practising several times a week and nearly 60% trusting religious leaders more than government officials. In the North, radio sermons and Sharia courts often set the tone for health and social norms. This deep influence reinforces stigma around suicide and mental health, where non-religious voices carry little weight.
The Sunshine Series works through these networks rather than around them. Pastors, imams, teachers, and traditional leaders are trained as lay counsellors, learning to spot symptoms and make referrals. “We explain that mental health issues are not a sign of weakness or low spirituality,” Aisha says. Even the radio drama featured a pastor in therapy, normalising help-seeking within faith contexts.
But obstacles remain. Suicide attempts are still criminalised, meaning callers to the 112 helpline risk being treated as offenders rather than patients. Ambulance services are limited, stigma runs deep, and many communities still frame suicide as sin.
Ambulance services are limited, stigma runs deep, and many communities still frame suicide as sin. A bill to decriminalise suicide attempts is now before the Senate, the product of advocacy by the National Suicide Prevention Advocacy Group, of which Sunshine Series is a member. It’s one step in aligning law with lived reality.
Scaling through Cascador to build Nigeria’s Mental Health economy
In 2025, Aisha joined Cascador, a Lagos-based accelerator for mid-stage entrepreneurs. She arrived sceptical, but left with sharper tools for growth. “Cascador forced me to stop thinking like an activist and start thinking like a builder,” she says. “Investors and policymakers respond not just to stories, but to numbers.”
That mindset shift anchors Sunshine Series’ next phase. The enterprise is expanding beyond workshops and helplines into a full digital platform: a mobile app that connects patients with clinicians, backed by AI-powered 24/7 support. Data from training will feed into epidemiological studies, generating anonymised insights that can inform policy and eventually be monetised to sustain scale.
But Aisha’s vision extends far beyond tech. Sunshine Series is helping the federal government roll out the new Mental Health Act across Nigeria’s 36 states and is contributing to suicide prevention frameworks at the national level. Her five-year goals include 100 corporate clients, 20 university partnerships, 5,000 trained lay counsellors, and app launches in diaspora markets in the United Kingdom, the US, and Canada.
For her, the measure of success won’t be media coverage or funding rounds. It will be whether a teenager in Kano, Lagos, or Houston can name their struggle, find support without shame, and, most importantly, survive.
See also: Blueroomcare secures $50K to expand access to mental health care in Nigeria
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