A Digital Shield Against Health Misinformation for Youth

KAIROS is a mission-driven health innovation startup based in Burkina Faso. We build solutions that help people make safer and more informed health decisions.

Our flagship solution for youth and adolescents, Wobsongo, is an AI-powered system designed to detect and analyze harmful misinformation online, especially misinformation related to sexual and reproductive health. The platform monitors content circulating on social media platforms such as TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, including content shared in local African languages like Mooré and Dioula.

But Wobsongo is more than a technology platform. It is also a deeply collective initiative rooted in the responsibility of being a caregiver and protector in a world where children’s exposure to online content is growing every day.

In many of our communities, sexual and reproductive health remains taboo, making it difficult for young people, especially girls and young women, to openly ask questions or access trusted guidance. As a result, the majority of them turn to the internet and social media for answers. Yet these spaces are increasingly saturated with harmful misinformation, manipulative commercial content, deepfakes and emotionally charged narratives that can influence how young people see their bodies, relationships, health and self-worth.

Wobsongo is a protective digital shield: a tool that helps young people develop critical thinking, question what they see online, and better distinguish trustworthy information from harmful manipulation. By combining artificial intelligence, local-language analysis and digital literacy education, we hope to help families and communities build safer digital environments where young people can learn, grow and make informed decisions with confidence and dignity.

Curbing the Spread of Harmful Health Narratives Online

Children and young people are growing up today in an environment where misinformation spreads faster than trusted information. In many communities, social media has become one of the main sources of information about health, relationships and sexuality, especially in contexts where insecurity has disrupted schools, community structures and access to health services.

Unfortunately, false or misleading content related to sexual and reproductive health can expose young people, particularly adolescent girls and young women, to harmful decisions, fear, stigma, unsafe practices and discrimination. As such, 90% of the top-performing videos on birth control are not from medical experts, and 53% of creators reject hormonal birth control. Many of them also express distrust of healthcare providers, and these statements are often rooted in subjective opinions and experiences, rather than citing scientific sources. The rise of deepfakes, manipulated videos and emotionally charged content is making this challenge even more dangerous and difficult to detect. For example, one widespread myth among youth is that modern contraception, especially implants and injectables, permanently causes infertility, with videos claiming "the implant moves through the body" or "destroys the womb." Out of fear, many girls avoid contraception despite being sexually active. In Burkina Faso adolescent fertility is about 102 births per 1,000 girls aged 15-19 (World Bank), and 42% of adolescent girls are out of school.

This problem is even more serious in low-resource and fragile settings where access to trusted information remains limited, especially in local languages. Wobsongo addresses several dimensions of this same challenge at once.

• For young people and communities, Wobsongo serves as a protective digital shield, strengthening critical thinking and helping users better recognise and question harmful or misleading online content.
• For decision-makers, institutions and public health actors, Wobsongo provides an early-warning and monitoring system through a real-time dashboard capable of detecting emerging misinformation trends, harmful narratives and potential threats affecting the sexual and reproductive health and rights of girls and women. This allows stakeholders to anticipate risks, better understand evolving online dynamics, and respond at the right moment with targeted awareness, prevention and protection actions.

By combining AI-powered monitoring, local-language analysis and digital literacy approaches, Wobsongo helps transform fragmented online information into actionable intelligence for both communities and decision-makers.

Extending AI to Underserved Languages and Communities

The scale and speed of online misinformation make it impossible to respond manually. Artificial intelligence and data science allow Wobsongo/youthshield to monitor large amounts of online content in real time and identify harmful narratives before they spread widely. AI also helps us analyse trends, languages and patterns that would otherwise remain invisible.

Blockchain technology strengthens transparency and traceability in how information and alerts are handled, helping improve trust and accountability. Concretely: every verification, and the dataset version behind it, is time-stamped and tamper-evident on-chain, so verdicts can be traced and independently audited and the record cannot be altered after the fact.

What is especially promising is the ability to adapt these technologies to underserved languages and communities that are often excluded from global AI systems.

Giving Young People the Tools to Question, Verify, and Decide

What makes Wobsongo different is that it was designed from the lived realities of African youth and local communities, where sexual and reproductive health often remains a taboo subject surrounded by silence, stigma and misinformation.

For many young people, the challenge is not only the lack of trustworthy information. It is also not knowing where to find reliable answers, struggling to understand the overwhelming amount of content available online, or not feeling safe or confident enough to discuss questions about their bodies, relationships and health openly.

Take a young person who comes across a health post and wants to know whether it can be trusted before acting on it. They send the post, link or audio to WobSongo and get a clear verdict on whether the information holds up, with a preliminary indication of what is reliable and what is not, and a recommendation to consult a health professional when uncertain. WobSongo verifies, it does not police: flagged content is not reported automatically to platforms or authorities. In parallel, the same signals feed the real-time dashboard so institutions can spot trends early.

Most existing misinformation monitoring systems focus primarily on high-resource languages, and very few specifically address sexual and reproductive health misinformation in culturally sensitive and low-resource settings.

Wobsongo helps break these barriers. By combining AI-powered monitoring, local-language analysis and digital literacy approaches, the platform helps young people better navigate complex online information environments, identify trustworthy content, and strengthen their confidence and critical thinking in contexts where open conversations about SRHR are often difficult.

Verifications are grounded in recognised public-health sources, WHO and UNFPA guidance, peer-reviewed medical literature and standard medical and gynaecology references, curated with our public-health experts. When a question goes beyond what these can confidently answer, the system does not guess; it points the user to a qualified professional.

Wobsongo prioritizes local African languages such as Mooré and Dioula because we observed that a large proportion of harmful content circulates in these languages.

Our solution also combines technology with education. Alongside AI monitoring, we developed the FOCUS method, a practical framework that helps young people critically analyze the information they consume and share online. 

FOCUS stands for: 

• F, Fact (is this scientifically verifiable?); 

• O, Opinion (a personal interpretation or experience?); 

• C, Claim/Belief (rumour, tradition or collective perception?); 

• U, Usefulness (helpful or potentially harmful?); 

• S, Settled Knowledge (aligned with validated references such as Ministries of Health, WHO guidelines or curricula?). 

Wobsongo is therefore about building long-term digital resilience.

Open Source as a Catalyst for Underserved Languages

Open Source helps make innovation more transparent, collaborative and scalable. By sharing components of our work openly, we can encourage collaboration with researchers, developers, educators and public health actors working on similar challenges around the world.

Open approaches are especially important for underserved languages because building quality datasets and tools requires collective effort and continuous improvement.

Open Source also helps build trust. Communities and partners can better understand how the system works and contribute to improving it.

From Lived Experiences to Action

Wobsongo emerged from years of field experience in public health and youth programming across Burkina Faso and the Sahel.

Our team repeatedly observed how misinformation around sexual and reproductive health affected young people’s decisions, behaviors and trust in health systems. We also noticed that false information often spreads faster and farther than verified information. At the same time, we saw how many existing digital tools overlooked local languages and local realities.

These experiences pushed us to imagine a solution rooted in technology and community realities, one that combines AI, public health expertise and youth engagement to strengthen digital trust.

Over a single year we witnessed four cancer cases among medical students under 25, and two women under 45 in our close circles died of metastatic cancer within a year of diagnosis. At the same time, my co-founder, Professor Kabore Fasnewinde Aristide, a urologist-andrologist, found fake Facebook and Google pages created in his name promoting "miracle cures." We realized misinformation had become a way to manipulate trust and exploit medical authority, and that prevention had to be rethought at its roots.

Led by Experts in Health, AI, and Community Engagement

KAIROS was co-founded by two health professionals whose complementary expertise shapes the foundation of the organisation. One is Stéphanie Nama, a physician and public health practitioner specialised in health literacy, prevention, and community-centred innovation among women, adolescents, and vulnerable populations. The other, Professor Kabore Fasnewinde Aristide, is a hospital-university professor, urologist-andrologist, and expert in health-training engineering and sexual and reproductive health (SRH) systems, with decades of clinical, academic, and research experience across West Africa.

Together, the founding team brings deep expertise spanning health literacy, sexual and reproductive health, artificial intelligence, health education engineering, behavioural sciences, local-language engagement, and community mobilisation—applied to the design of solutions tailored for young people.

Wobsongo was developed through this foundation in close collaboration with a multidisciplinary network of public health experts, AI specialists, researchers, educators, and youth actors. These collaborations ensure that the solution remains both scientifically grounded and responsive to real community needs.

The initiative is further strengthened through a partnership with ImpactScope, our technology partner specialising in AI and blockchain systems, including in the context of our ongoing work with UNICEF to advance the platform.

Importantly, we also work closely with young changemakers, who actively contribute to testing, feedback, and contextual adaptation—ensuring that Wobsongo remains relevant, accessible, and grounded in the lived realities of the communities it serves

More Inclusive Solutions through Diversity

Diversity is essential because misinformation affects communities differently. Building effective solutions requires multiple perspectives: technical expertise, lived experience, cultural understanding and community trust. Our diverse team helps us better understand how information spreads across different languages, age groups and social realities (such as oral tradition, and perceptions of sexuality).

It also allows us to design solutions that are more inclusive, ethical and relevant for the populations we serve. For us, diversity is a core driver of innovation and sustainable impact.

Testing, Strengthening, and Scaling Wobsongo

The investment from the UNICEF Venture Fund will help to finance the tool’s implementation. It will also help us strengthen and scale Wobsongo’s multilingual AI capabilities.

The pilot has two parts: community and youth-centred testing in Burkina Faso targeting adolescents and youth aged 15-24 (at least 50% girls and young women, including displaced youth, adolescent mothers and GBV survivors), expected to involve roughly 210-300 participants; and institutional dashboard testing with at least four ministries (health, youth, humanitarian action, digital transformation) and UN partners including UNICEF Burkina Faso. 

A major focus will be on expanding datasets and improving detection models for local African languages such as Mooré and Dioula. We will also strengthen our infrastructure, improve real-time monitoring systems, and deepen youth-centered testing and engagement.

This support is also catalytic for our long-term sustainability. It helps validate our approach, strengthen partnerships in our ecosystem  and position Wobsongo for future investment and regional scaling opportunities in West Africa.

Being part of 2 cohorts i.e. Femtech Ventures, and Data Trust, we hope to sharpen product and user-research skills and a sustainable model and develop stronger responsible-data and privacy practices and an open-source approach including a labelled local-language dataset as a digital public good. More broadly, we hope to garner more visibility through UNICEF and its network being part of the 2 cohorts.

Building Momentum

Some of our key milestones over the past 6 months (November 2025 to May 2026) include:

• Selection as part of the inaugural UNICEF Femtech Ventures cohort, as well as the Data and Trust cohort
• Engagement of youth changemakers to support co-creation and testing.
• Development of a source of truth dataset
• Ongoing development of Wobsongo’s multilingual misinformation monitoring pipeline.
• The start of SRH local-language data collection for Mooré and Dioula content analysis.
• Strengthening the partnership between KAIROS and ImpactScope.
• Initial dashboard development for misinformation trend analysis and early warning monitoring.
• Design a partnership with one private school and a health  insurance company.
• Increased visibility and collaboration opportunities through regional and international innovation ecosystems.

Connect and Collaborate with Us

Misinformation is a public health and social resilience challenge. We invite researchers, youth organisations, technologists, educators and partners to join us in building safer digital spaces for young people.

Follow our journey on  LinkedIn or Karma, collaborate with us by sharing your insights or supporting data collection efforts, and help strengthen digital trust in underserved communities. We also welcome contributions that enable us to expand access for the communities who need it most.

We also welcome technical collaborations or the larger community who are interested in our technical work on GitHub and Hugging Face.