Snuggli Health equips community mental health officers with culturally grounded screening tools to find young people who are struggling — and gives those young people support in their hands while they wait for care.
Working with 50 volunteer community mental health officers across Greater Accra and Oti, we ran structured screenings in schools and community settings. Sadness, worry and sleep disturbance appeared together in over half of screenings. Self-harm concerns appeared in roughly one in four. Reports of trauma in two in five.
These young people were not unusually unwell. They were unusually asked.
One in three young people we screened needed onward care. Almost all of them were referred to a single psychiatric hospital. Screening more people without building referral capacity does not close the gap — it moves the bottleneck downstream.
So we are building both halves.
and tracks whether the care we referred actually happened — including the referrals that stalled.
giving young people real support in their hands during the weeks (or months) before a referral turns into an appointment.
alongside Ghana's mental health system, not around it — because a national system is the only thing that reaches everyone.
Community officers, nurses and counsellors use Sentra to screen young people, record what they find, make referrals, and see which referrals were never completed. It works offline, because the places that need it most have the worst connectivity.
A private, free app where a young person can name what they are feeling in 60 seconds, talk to a companion that listens without judgement, and find real help — including in the weeks before a referral turns into an appointment.
Ghana has a handful of psychiatrists for tens of millions of people. Care will not come from specialists alone — it comes from the nurse, the community officer, the teacher who notices first. Our tools are built for them.
Ghana has a handful of psychiatrists for tens of millions of people. Care will not come from specialists alone — it comes from the nurse, the community officer, the teacher who notices first.
Our tools are quick to learn and usable by the people already in the room, so screening can happen with or without a clinical specialist present.
The places that need it most have the worst connectivity. Sentra runs offline and syncs later.
Distress is expressed through family, faith, the body, and social pressure — not textbook symptom lists. Our screening is built around that.
Snuggli Health was founded by Kwame Owusu Ansah, a Ghanaian entrepreneur and health-technology builder. Our clinical direction is guided by Ghanaian psychiatrists and mental health practitioners, including advisers working inside Ghana's Mental Health Authority.
The people who ran the Ghana screenings — 50 volunteer community mental health officers — are part of this story. They are the ones who proved the model works in the field.
Mental health technology must be safe before it is scalable. We use AI to support reflection, documentation, routing, and workflow visibility — while keeping high-risk decisions, escalation, and clinical judgment human-led.
We publish what our tools can and cannot do, and we are candid about what is still being built.
AI-assisted outputs are reviewable and editable.
AI does not diagnose, prescribe, or close cases.
High-risk cases require human-led safety workflows.
Users see only what they are allowed to see.
Actions, referrals, follow-ups, and closures are logged.
Sensitive mental health data is handled with clear governance controls.
For funders and partners
We are raising philanthropic support to run screening at scale across three regions of Ghana and to build the referral follow-up that makes it count.
Talk to us about fundingFor schools, clinics, NGOs and health services
If you work with young people and want a structured way to find those who need help, we would like to talk.
Talk to us about deployment