What this is
BrainBuzz Africa is an ADHD awareness and education project. It started on Instagram and this site is its home: the same material, with room to be properly useful.
The promise is short: understand your brain, find your next step. Everything here is built to do three things in order — help you recognise a difficulty, understand it without shame, and leave with one practical action.
Who writes this
I'm Jordan Tanko. I'm Nigerian, I live in Dallas, Texas, and I started BrainBuzz Africa.
I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. I went looking for an explanation for why I kept starting things and losing them, found the research, recognised myself in it, and was then assessed by a clinician who confirmed it. What stayed with me afterwards was how long I had gone without that information — and how many people where I am from will go a whole life without it, because the words offered instead are stubborn, lazy, wasted potential.
That is what this site is for.
What stands behind it
Lived experience, not clinical training. I have ADHD. I am not a doctor, a psychologist or a therapist, and nothing here is personal medical advice.
No clinician has reviewed this site. That is a gap, not a credential, and it belongs on this page rather than out of sight. In its place, every clinical claim is tied to a published source you can check yourself — NICE, the CDC, NIMH, the World Federation of ADHD consensus statement — all listed on the sources page.
I write and check everything here. Where the Naija Pidgin still needs a first-language review, that is stated rather than assumed.
BrainBuzz Africa is an independent project. Everything on it is free. It sells nothing, carries no advertising, and has no commercial sponsor.
Who it is for
Anyone whose attention does not behave the way they were told it should. The examples lean Nigerian, because that is where this started and because those experiences are badly served elsewhere — the "bright but lazy" child, the household where there was no word for this, the adult still carrying a name they were given at nine. You do not have to be Nigerian, or African, or diagnosed, to use any of it.
How it is written
Every factual claim links to its source. The sources page lists all of them: clinical guidelines from NICE, public-health material from the CDC and NIMH, the World Federation of ADHD consensus statement, and specific meta-analyses and studies. Where the evidence is partial, the page says so rather than rounding it up.
We write in English and Naija Pidgin. Both versions carry the same meaning, including the same uncertainty — a hedge in English stays a hedge in Pidgin. The Pidgin is written to a documented phrasebook so the spelling and voice stay consistent.
No invented authority. We do not publish testimonials we do not have, and we do not quote statistics we cannot cite.
What this will never do
- Diagnose you, or tell you how likely a diagnosis is. Only a qualified clinician can assess that.
- Recommend medications or doses.
- Suggest that ADHD explains every difficulty you have.
- Ask you to sign up before giving you something useful.
- Send anything you type into a tool to us or to anyone else.
Credit and corrections
If something here is wrong, out of date, or badly translated, that matters and we would rather know. Email brainbuzzafrica@gmail.com, or reach the Instagram account — whichever is easier.