Kemi: A WhatsApp chatbot standing between women and digital abuse

Open WhatsApp, save one more number, send a hello, and a chatbot named Kemi answers back: private, judgment-free, and built for a problem Nigeria has struggled to name, let alone solve: technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV).

Launched in July 2025 by the Brain Builders Youth Development Initiative (BBYDI), Kemi speaks to users in English, French, Swahili, Arabic, Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo; a deliberate attempt to meet girls and women in the languages they actually think in, across Nigeria, Benin, Ghana, Togo and Cameroon. Reach it on WhatsApp and it asks a simple question upfront: are you here to report an incident, or looking for support? Choose to report, and Kemi walks you through the steps, before asking for your location and pointing you toward relevant local channels. Choose support, and it offers a library of materials meant to remind survivors that they are not alone.

Since launch, Kemi has processed over 10,000 queries, with more than 4,600 people interacting with it directly, according to BBYDI Executive Director, Abideen Olasupo.

When Sunday Tribune interacted with the tool, one limitation stood out. Asked how to report a case, Kemi directed us to “local law enforcement” – accurate, but not specific enough for a survivor who has no idea the ideal station or officer near her location to approach.

In an interview with Sunday Tribune, Olasupo does not shy away from that gap. He revealed that version 2.0 of the chatbot, due later this year, is being built to close it. Alongside a mobile app for Android and iOS, it will introduce a “safety vault” where survivors can privately store evidence – screenshots, images, messages – before they are deleted or lost, and a visualisation platform to help track how TFGBV cases are reported and resolved. Location-specific reporting guidance, the exact issue Sunday Tribune ran into while testing Kemi, is also part of that roadmap.

Olasupo is careful, though, not to oversell what the chatbot can do. He concedes that Kemi is not a replacement for a psychologist; it cannot substitute for professional mental health care. What it can do, he says, is point survivors in the right direction: toward the right authority to report to, the right kind of support to seek, and the reassurance that what happened to them isn’t something to carry in silence.

Why a tool like this exists

To understand why BBYDI built Kemi, it helps to understand what a survivor without it is up against.

Take Fisayo, a 19-year-old university student. She doesn’t remember agreeing to an intimate photo of her. She found out the way most people in her situation find out: a classmate sent a text message to her on WhatsApp and asked if she was okay. Attached was an intimate image of her, AI-generated but disturbingly convincing, already making its rounds through several WhatsApp groups on campus. She has no idea who made it, or why.

Her friends have rallied around her, telling anyone who will listen that the image is fake, that it was built by an app, not taken by a camera. Some classmates believe them. Some don’t. Fisayo lives with that shadow every day; the quiet suspicion that somewhere on campus, someone still thinks it was real, and that no explanation will ever fully close the distance between what happened and what people believe happened.

READ ALSO: Firm launches AI WhatsApp chatbot, Kemi, for TFGBV survivors

This is the shape TFGBV now takes for a growing number of Nigerian girls and women. It goes beyond an inappropriate DM or a humiliating viral post; it is a digital extension of the same gender inequalities that have always existed offline, now amplified by tools that can fabricate a violation out of nothing but a photograph.

“Threats, doxxing, non-consensual image sharing, stalking, cyberbullying: all of it carries emotional, psychological and, at times, physical consequences,” a gender equality advocate, Ngozi Chukwuemeka, told Sunday Tribune. She notes that, in places where access to digital spaces is already limited, TFGBV does double damage, pushing girls further away from the opportunities the internet is supposed to open up.

What makes Fisayo’s case unsettling isn’t just what happened to her, it is how little it took. No hacked account, no stolen device, no elaborate plot. Just a photograph already sitting somewhere online, and software that can turn it into something else in seconds. Before generative AI became this accessible, a nonconsensual intimate image required an actual image to leak. Now it does not require anything real at all; only a target and a willing user. That shift has quietly rewritten what safety online means for young women, who can no longer protect themselves simply by never taking or sending a compromising photo in the first place. The abuse no longer needs their participation to exist.

A crime rarely reported

Fisayo has thought about reporting what happened to her. She has not. Shame plays a part, but so does something more basic: she does not know where to take a case like hers. Is it the police? The school authority? A lawyer? Nobody has given her a clear answer, and the uncertainty itself has become a reason to stay quiet. It is only recently, after a friend pointed her to Kemi, that Fisayo has started asking the chatbot questions she was too afraid to ask anyone else: a small, private first step toward figuring out what to do next.

But Fisayo’s hesitation before that first message to Kemi was not unusual, it is the norm. A 2023 study published in African Medical Sciences, which surveyed 153 young Nigerian women who had experienced sexual violence, found that only 3.3 percent of cases were ever reported to law enforcement. The reasons survivors gave for staying silent were familiar: fear, shame, self-blame, distrust of the police, a wish to protect their privacy, or simply not knowing what reporting would achieve. It’s precisely that silence — the not-knowing-where-to-turn that kept Fisayo quiet for weeks — that Kemi was built to interrupt.

And even for survivors who push past the stigma and report, help on the other side is scarce. Nigeria has only 319 licensed clinical psychologists registered with the Nigerian Association of Clinical Psychologists, though estimates suggest the real number of practising professionals may be closer to 400 or 500. Qualifications vary wildly too — some practitioners have a six-month certification, others a full doctorate — making it hard to even know who is properly equipped to help. For a country of over 200 million people, those numbers are disturbing. For a teenager processing the trauma of having her image weaponised against her, they can mean the difference between healing and carrying the wound alone.

A crisis moving faster than the law

The urgency behind tools like Kemi has only grown with the rise of generative AI. Fisayo’s ordeal — an image she never posed for, built by software and set loose on WhatsApp — is no longer a rare occurrence. It sits inside a much larger, global crisis.

That crisis found a face in January 2026, when Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok, built into X, formerly known as Twitter, was found to comply en masse with user requests to “undress” real women in photographs, generating sexualised images without their knowledge or consent.

Within roughly two weeks of the scandal breaking, Grok had reportedly produced an estimated 23,000 s3xualised images involving children and over a million more depicting women, according to research made by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate. Some users asked for explicit poses; the bot often complied. Malaysia and Indonesia responded by blocking the platform outright. The European Union (EU) invoked its AI Act. The United Kingdom’s Office of Communications, better known as Ofcom, also opened a formal investigation into X under the Online Safety Act, and the government announced new criminal offences targeting both the creation of nonconsensual sexual deepfakes and the “nudification” tools used to make them, closing a loophole that had, until then, only criminalised sharing such images, not making them in the first place.

However, Nigeria has no equivalent law built specifically for this moment. The closest legal tool is Section 24 of the Cybercrimes (Prohibition, Prevention, etc.) Act 2015, its cyberstalking provision, often loosely referred to as the country’s anti-cyberbullying law. It criminalises sending messages that are “grossly offensive, pornographic or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character,” with penalties of up to three years in prison, a fine of ₦7 million, or both.

Legal experts argue that the cyberstalking provision could arguably be stretched to cover AI-generated nonconsensual images, but it was not written with tools like Grok in mind, and it says nothing about the platforms and AI systems that make the abuse possible at scale. Nigeria, like most of the world, is legislating in the past tense for a threat that keeps outrunning it.

Olasupo says that is the space Kemi is trying to hold in the meantime; not a courtroom, not a therapist’s office, but a first, judgment-free door for girls like Fisayo to walk through, in a language they understand, at the moment they need it most.