It's been five years since Victor Ugo founded Mentally Aware Nigeria Initiative (MANI), a youth-led and youth-focused non-governmental organisation working to end the stigma and discrimination attached to mental health in Nigeria and the rest of Africa.

Today, the organisation has become a household name when it comes to mental health care and awareness in Nigeria, especially among young people. Across social media and offline, MANI has become a go-to source for mental health support.

With over 130 million unique social media users reached every year, and more than 30,000 people who have received crisis support via MANI in the last four years, the nonprofit’s impact is evident.

Ugo, who is also a medical doctor, was inspired to establish MANI after he was diagnosed with depression in 2014. It could be easy to think that as a doctor, the signs would have been clear to him, but they weren’t and that was a shocking realisation for him.

“That was when it dawned on me that there were so many people, and especially without the medical background, who would find it even more difficult and almost impossible to recognise mental health difficulties in themselves and in their close relatives,” he told BellaNaija in a 2018 interview.

As part of the BellaNaija x Global Citizen content series IMPACTER, which works to shine a light on Nigerians making a difference for their communities, we sat down with Ugo to learn more about MANI's important work.

What MANI does is offer “mental health first aid and crisis support for people with mental health needs,” says Ugo. He notes that most people who call their support lines simply need someone to talk to and often people feel better afterwards.

But it doesn't stop there, Ugo and his team also provide referral services so people can speak with qualified psychiatrists and psychologists if they need to.

MANI serves as "that stranger that you can reach out to to talk about your mental health," he says, adding that the organisation’s recruitment process is quite strict "because we know that we're dealing with people's mental health."

Read the full article about mental health in Nigeria by Akindare Okunola at Global Citizen.