Imagine a sixteen-year-old girl in Ouagadougou. She is bright, curious, and full of questions about her changing body, about relationships, about love and safety. But when she tries to ask her mother, the words catch in her throat. In her community, topics like sex, pregnancy, and contraception are not discussed openly. At school, the teacher skips over the chapter on reproductive health with an awkward silence. So, like millions of young people across West Africa and beyond, she opens her phone. She scrolls through TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, typing her questions into the search bar in her own language, Mooré…

Every family has at least one WhatsApp group that is a strange cocktail of grocery lists, birthday plans, unsolicited weather warnings and the occasional article that someone’s aunt has forwarded without reading. Mine is no exception. My uncle believes in miracle cures; my cousin replies with eye-roll emojis; my grandmother forwards videos of baby animals and vaguely apocalyptic news stories in equal measure. We laugh, sigh, sometimes argue, and try to move on. But in recent years, politicians and commentators have looked at this messy, human, unsupervised conversation and concluded that it needs supervision. The headline of a recent Australian…