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Digital Wellbeing by hub-LABS
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No Kenyan child should meet the internet alone.

Kenya has more smartphones than feature phones. More than half of Kenyan children who go online were handed a device with no instructions at all.

We work with schools, parents and students to change that — together, in the same week, in the same language.

83.5%
of Kenya's connected phones are now smartphones — for the first time, smartphones outnumber feature phones. Communications Authority of Kenya, June 2025
56%
of Kenyan children who use the internet have received no online-safety information at all. Disrupting Harm Kenya, 2021
99%
of Kenyan children who go online do so via a smartphone. Only 15% have ever used the internet at school. Disrupting Harm Kenya, 2021

The situation

The problem is not the phone

Most conversations about children and technology start with how much. That question doesn't get you very far in Kenya.

Here, the phone is often how a child does homework, reaches a parent, moves money, finds out what is happening. Taking it away is not a plan, and for many families it is not even an option.

The Kenyan problem is different, and the data is clear about it. Children are online early, alone, and unequipped. Nearly half of their caregivers have never used the internet themselves. When something goes wrong, over a third of children tell nobody at all.

The gap is not access. The gap is accompaniment.

See what the Kenyan data actually says →

Our approach

Four things we work for

  1. 01

    No child meets the internet alone.

    Every child with a connected device has a trained adult alongside them — parent, guardian or teacher.

  2. 02

    Sleep is not negotiable.

    Devices leave the bedroom at night. It is the one thing every health authority in the world agrees on, and it costs a family nothing.

  3. 03

    Social media can wait — and nobody should go first alone.

    A collective decision between families, not a rule imposed on one child.

  4. 04

    Every school has a written device and online-safety policy.

    Published, understood by parents, and with a named person responsible for it.

The programme

How it works

Students first.

Interactive workshops, class by class, in normal lesson time. Not a lecture — a conversation. We collect what your students actually say, anonymously.

Then staff.

A 75-minute session for teachers, grounded in research — and in what your own students told us the day before.

Then parents.

A 90-minute session that brings it together, with practical tools and the Family Digital Pact.

One week. One school. One shared language.

See the programme →

Honesty

What we will not tell you

We will not tell you screens are destroying your children's brains. The research on ordinary social media use is genuinely contested and we will show you both sides.

We will not tell you a phone ban will raise your exam results. The best evidence says it usually doesn't.

We will tell you what is well-evidenced: sleep, exploitation, cyberbullying, and the fact that Kenyan children are navigating all of it without help.

Read the evidence — including what we don't know →