Who we are
Joy, Inc. is a revolutionary business working to mainstream the science of human flourishing, showing how positive psychology and the power of emotions can transform culture, shape leadership, and inspire a new generation of Africans committed to the greatest happiness for the greatest many.
We are also focused on redefining what true success means. Through research, storytelling, and advocacy, we help shift global conversations around policy, business, economics, education, social change, and governance toward metrics rooted in wellbeing, purpose, and human dignity.
Today, Joy, Inc. has evolved into Africa’s media hub enabling the storytelling ecosystem and the creator economy. Through training, production, incubation, and acceleration, we nurture creators, build platforms, and amplify voices, all with a focus on social impact, emotional healing, and collective flourishing.
Our work rests on five transformative assignments that shape how individuals, creators, organisations, and societies can flourish:
- Equip individuals to live joyful, flourishing lives: We translate the science of wellbeing and positive psychology into tools, stories, and practices that help people heal, grow, and build meaningful lives.
- Build joyful, high-impact organisations: We help institutions create emotionally intelligent, human-centered workplaces where people thrive and productivity grows through wellbeing, purpose, and trust.
- Transform the creator ecosystem through training, incubation & acceleration: We train emerging creators, incubate groundbreaking ideas, and accelerate bold storytelling venture, building a new generation of African voices shaping culture, media, and the future of work.
- Strengthen social movements rooted in hope, compassion & non-violence: We support advocates, changemakers, and community builders with research and tools that elevate hope over cynicism, and model the enduring power of justice, empathy, and peaceful transformation.
- Inspire nations to build flourishing, emotionally healthy societies: We help leaders and policymakers embrace human-centered development, fostering communities built on vulnerability, compassion, creativity, and collective wellbeing.
Our priorities, over next 21 years.
Build and deploy research-driven cultural products — books, online learning, events, film, and television — that popularize and mainstream the evidence from positive psychology, making it accessible across the continent.
Train over 100,000 young creatives in content development and storytelling, equipping a new generation to shape culture, strengthen the creator economy, and lead Africa’s creative future.
Tell African stories to Africans first, restoring pride in identity and helping people reclaim and celebrate their ‘Africanness’ before presenting it to the world.
Support organisations in building joyful, human-centered environments by facilitating training programmes that integrate wellbeing, emotional intelligence, and positive organisational practices.
Train and mentor leaders across the creator ecosystem — helping them build authentic stories, powerful brands, and meaningful connections with their audiences.
Our primary target is Africa. We are convinced that in fully harnessing the power of emotions (with a focus on resilience research) in line with the current thinking across sociology, psychology, divinity and behavioural economics; Africa’s new generation can possess the tools needed to leapfrog around the considerable obstacles that prevent its youth from achieving full potential and transforming nations. Preliminary theses centered within Africa on Botswana and Mauritius, and outside Africa on the United Arab Emirates and the Kingdom of Bhutan provide a foundational framework for how harnessing the power of emotions, against the background of evidence-based interventions, can help accelerate massive economic and social change.
The urgent imperative
“The world has come to a place where everything we assumed – the liberal consensus, capitalism and the wealth of nations, self-interest and the cunning of reason, the rationality of markets and human behavior – everything has been turned upon its head. Those assumptions have led us to this depression epidemic across the world, a fundamental hopelessness (including loss of dignity) and cynicism and the anti-establishment rage that has taken over the youth.
“We are at a time in our history when we have the impetus to rethink everything from Adam Smith to Alexis de Tocqueville. I tell people that the fact that Richard Thaler just won the Nobel Prize for Economics, a year after another behavioural economist, is a really big deal. It’s a really huge deal. We are at the cusp of fundamentally rethinking our assumptions about human behavior, and rethinking the metrics for measuring human success and flourishing. These are historic times we live in.
“If we are going to transform the lives of people and then our nations in meaningful ways, we have to learn from the globally available models that make it possible, we have to follow the evidence, we have to think bigger than the reactionary. And we have to do all of these without losing what researchers term the character virtues that enable you zoom out, to broaden and build; to maintain social, emotional and psychological equilibrium. Social movements often flame out. Political movements often fold into self-interest. Contemporary economic systems have proven globally inadequate. We need something different – what some have called a politics (and a culture) of meaning, but this time centred on the evidence across the fields of sociology, divinity, psychology, politics, and economics.”
Africa can lead in this new revolution. That is our mission.
- Chude Jideonwo, Yale University, November 2017
