My name is Olamikun Jason Ogunleye, and I founded Teen Med Magazine, a youth-led publication making health and medical literature accessible to teenagers around the world, when I was 16.
In April 2025, I was in the middle of my IGCSE and AS Level exam preparation at Meadowhall, which in hindsight was exactly the wrong time to start anything new. But I wanted to publish online a medical article I had written. I typed some version of “medical magazine for teenagers” into the search bar, expecting a dozen results. I wanted something for teenagers, not another university journal or a website only looking for PhD research papers. I found nothing, except one youth medical journal that had clearly been abandoned many years ago.
I remember sitting with my laptop, not feeling satisfied. How does this not exist? There should be a medical magazine simply for teenagers. Then it hit me: maybe I was just supposed to build it myself.
The idea became fully formed in May 2025, and I started building towards the end of the month. I would revise economics by day and sketch out an entire publication by night, which is not a combination I’d recommend to anyone. I reached out to Michelle Ossai, a friend from another school in Lagos, and asked if she wanted to build this with me. She said yes, and she’s been Co-founder and Managing Editor ever since. I remain the Editor-in-Chief. The two of us spent long calls just thinking out loud about what the site would be called, what it should look like, and how writers would apply. We also knew a domain wouldn’t be free, so I pitched to my mom, asking if she could pay for it. She agreed.
We launched in June 2025. Our first published article came from Sindara Opaleye, a girl in my class who was already deep into literature and writing, and who I asked to help us open the magazine because I knew she’d get it right. She did, quickly, and that first piece is the reason Teen Med Magazine exists as more than an idea.
Reaching out to people I already knew got us our first handful of writers, but that only ever works for so long. Personal contacts got us maybe five articles before the well ran dry, and I knew we needed something that could scale beyond my circle of friends. I’d been an ambassador for a few other teen-led initiatives before starting Teen Med Magazine, so I understood the model from the other side, and I built an ambassador programme in which teenagers helped introduce new writers from their communities to the magazine. My own international contacts were thin at the time, but I’d spent a lot of time in online Model UN conferences, so I went back into those old MUN WhatsApp groups and just asked. A surprising number of people said yes. By the time the ambassador program launched, we already had twelve ambassadors across ten countries.
Honestly, going in, I half expected this to be the part that failed. I wasn’t sure teenagers actually wanted to write about medicine, not read about it, write about it, unprompted, in their free time. I was wrong, and I’m glad I was. Applications started arriving from places I hadn’t expected, different countries, different ages, but with the same underlying curiosity. One contributor wrote about their experience volunteering in hospice care and how relentless the work was, arguing that nursing assistants do 90% of the work but are paid exceedingly low. I think it’s really valuable when teens with medical experience share their stories and connect them to broader ideas. That changed how I saw people my own age. I’d assumed most teenagers wanted this stuff explained to them. Turns out a lot of them just wanted somewhere to say it themselves.
The ambassador program worked so well that I was quickly overwhelmed by the influx of writer applications, and I knew almost immediately that I couldn’t keep processing them by hand. I started looking into automation, and built our first system to send confirmation emails to new applicants. It worked fine when I tested it on my own inbox. Then I ran it on two writers who had just applied, and watched as it fired off six emails each, with no way to stop or unsend them. I suppose that was the magazine’s first technical disruption.
Running an ambassador program taught me things no article ever could. As we launched it, I introduced a monthly recognition system to reward our best-performing ambassadors. The idea was that it might encourage ambassadors to be more proactive, but within a month I had to shut it down. I sensed that ambassadors who weren’t recognised felt discouraged, especially given that writers they were bringing in slowed to a trickle. So I restructured the whole thing, let them work at their own pace, and added a small optional field to the writer application so contributors could credit the ambassador who referred them, instead of ambassadors having to track it manually. Productivity went up almost immediately. The ambassador team has turned over a lot since then; some have left, new ones have joined, a few have stayed the whole way, but it’s leaner and more effective than it’s ever been.
At some point, I looked at our website and knew it wouldn’t be taken seriously the way it looked. It lacked personality and looked uninteresting. I’d spent about five years doing graphic design as a hobby, so I figured, why not build the magazine I’d dreamt of. I redesigned the logo, reworked the colour scheme, and rebuilt the typography. The rebuild took close to two weeks, most weekends gone entirely with 10+ hour working sessions at a time, plus whatever twenty minutes I could spare during school. I know 10 hours sounds dramatic, but it’s not unusual for me to get totally consumed by work, skipping multiple meals. When I finally published it and announced the rebrand to our ambassadors, it was the first time the site actually looked like what I’d imagined the whole time.
Because the magazine lived entirely online, I assumed I could run it from anywhere, and for a while, that held. When I moved to the US to finish high school, nothing about Teen Med Magazine needed to change. Then, over the summer in Pennsylvania, I got seriously sick. I was hospitalised and tested for COVID and the flu before anyone realised, two days in, that it was malaria, contracted back in Nigeria and only symptomatic once I was in the US. I was treated at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, too unwell to eat properly, let alone open my laptop. Coming back to a magazine that had idled in my absence was the moment I understood how fragile “running it from anywhere” actually was if it still depended on one person’s daily input. I gave Michelle more backend access, and I started automating far more of the day-to-day, using Google Apps Script and Zapier, with AI helping me write the code I didn’t have the skill to write cleanly myself. Within a week, the systems were running on their own.
People’s initial reaction, including other teenagers’, to learning about my magazine says a lot about how little the world expects from young people. How are they so sure that my parents started it for me or that I had outside help? I don’t exactly blame people for asking, but I do find it interesting. Is it really that unusual for teenagers to build something of their own in an “adult world” that often excludes us? Starting Teen Med Magazine has only reinforced what I already believed: young people are far more capable than they’re often given credit for. Growing up in Nigeria, health conversations happened around teenagers, not with them. I still remember a teacher telling our class, with total confidence, that wall geckos are deadly and shared an article that a family of 6 had died because a wall gecko had trampled on their food. Wall geckos are not deadly, obviously, but nobody in the room questioned it because we had no prior knowledge about health science to check against it. That’s the gap I wanted to close.
Today, we’ve published more than a hundred articles, built a team of over fifty teen contributors and eight global ambassadors across six countries, and reached readers in more than twenty countries.
People ask what happens when I turn twenty and I’m technically no longer a teenager. I can confidently say that the magazine will not end. I started Teen Med Magazine to platform the youth, and I intend to keep growing it as an adult. Practically, that would likely entail bringing on volunteers and building out a proper team so the organisation stops depending on me working on it for hours every single week. The goal is for Teen Med Magazine to become a much larger organisation over time, with more reach, more teenagers writing and editing and leading inside it, not less, even as the person who started it ages out of being a teenager himself. Sindara aged out into her own publication. Ambassadors rotate in and out every few months. In a lot of ways, the magazine has always been designed to outlast any one contributor’s teenage years.
I often still think about my first search for a teen medical magazine to publish my medical article. At the time, it felt like a dead end, but I’ve found that sometimes a dead end actually is a sign to pave your own path.
The post How 16-Year-Old Olamikun Ogunleye Built The Teen Med Magazine, a Youth-Led Health Publication appeared first on BellaNaija - Showcasing Africa to the world. Read today!.