A GROUND-BREAKING WOMEN’S SAFETY APP PARTNERSHIP HAS WON THE GLOBAL WOMANITY AWARD 2018 AT TECH4DEV UNESCO CONFERENCE, LAUSANNE

• SafetiPin and Soul City Institute, two women’s rights organisations who will together launch a suite of safety apps for women in South African cities has won the Womanity Award 2018.

• The SafetiPin apps use live video footage filmed by Uber taxis and crowdsourced data from women and volunteers to show safest areas of cities for women.

• The Apps are currently being used by over 100,000 people, mostly in India (yesterday announced as the most dangerous country in the world for women by the Thomson Reuters Foundation) with widespread success. In Delhi, seven different government departments have used the apps’ data to make urban areas safer for women.

HOW DO THE SAFETIPIN APPS WORK?

• The flagship app – My SafetiPin – places red, orange and green pins on virtual city maps indicating which areas are the safest/ least dangerous for women.
  

• Factors assessed include lighting, quality of walk/ cycle paths, gender balance in the streets and general feeling of safety on streets and on public transport.
  

• Safety information is fed into the app from women’s own experiences, focus groups with young women, volunteer research and live video footage filmed by Uber taxis moving around cities.
  

“The title of this year’s Womanity Award: ‘Creating Safer Urban Environments for Women’, is very timely. In the last year, a growing number of women have taken to social media to reveal the true extent of the abuse and threats they face daily in their cities.

“With more people living in cities than ever before and the trend set to continue, this situation is highly concerning. Presently, women and girls find themselves avoiding multiple areas around their hometowns, or not wanting to go out after dusk. It means they cannot participate fully in life, work, education or social time and are severely restricted from living a fulfilling life. This is the reason for our theme this year.”

THE PROBLEM OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN IN SOUTH AFRICA

South Africa has a femicide rate five times the global average (Statistics SA, 2016). One of the duo’s first tasks will be trying to make public minivan taxis safer for women in South Africa. They are widely used by women because alternatives are limited, but are known for being highly unsafe. Last year, concern and terror among users of the vans escalated to a disturbing new level when a woman passenger was abducted in Johannesburg and raped in a taxi in front of her 10-year-old son.

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