Making cities safer by encouraging equal access to public spaces for everyone especially women, through the use of crowdsourced data and technology

Safecity

 

Safecity collects data of sexual harassment and abuse that happen around the city through an application and an online platform. The social enterprise also does campaigns and workshops in local communities to sensitise young people on the issue of sexual harassment and train them on how to use the app to log the level of safety they experience in their neighbourhood.

Its founder, Elsa Marie D’Silva, took part in Social Entrepreneurship Forum’s SE Outreach Accelerator in 2015, and recalls her mentor Lena Ramfelt pushing her to think hard about what her product was and how she could become financially sustainable. She learned a lot about her team structure and what changes she needed to make in order to make Safecity stronger.

The social impact of Safecity has greatly increased and the total number of people who directly benefitted from its work in 2017 reached about 300,000.

Elsa and her Safecity has also been recognised internationally by many awards and programmes. The most recent ones from 2017 are: Google #SMBHeroes Award in the Digital Impact category; Vital Voices Global Leadership Awards 2017; Rotary Award for Woman of Substance; Award in Social Impact by World CSR Congress; and Gold Award by Internet & Mobile Association of India.

Recently, Safecity has established a partnership with 2016 SE Outreach Accelerator alumna Anja Juliah Abu Bakar’s Malaysian social enterprise Athena Empowers. Safecity will support Malaysian organisations by providing their training modules for free and in return the Malaysian organisation will promote Safecity’s apps encouraging more people to download and use them in Malaysia.

 

“The SE Outreach Accelerator gave me an opportunity to reflect on what I had achieved with Safecity, evaluate the gaps in the processes and help me plan for scale. I felt confident on returning that I could meet the challenges facing my organisation” – Elsa Marie D’Silva, Founder, Safecity

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