COMMUNITIES, WHICH HAS SIGNIFICANT HUMAN AND ECONOMIC COSTS FOR SOCIETY.
ALTHOUGH THERE ARE MANY STRONG PROGRAMMES ADDRESSING VIOLENCE AGAINST
WOMEN GLOBALLY, FEW CATALYSE PARTNERSHIPS BETWEEN ORGANISATIONS IN DIFFERENT
COUNTRIES, AND SUPPORT A THOROUGH ADAPTATION PROCESS TO NEW GEOGRAPHIES.
Womanity Award 1: Engaging Men and Boys to Fight Gender Based Violence - Promundo (US-Brazil) & Abaad (Lebanon)
Womanity Award 2: Tackling Online Violence Against Women - Association for Progressive Communications (South Africa) & Luchadoras (Mexico)
Womanity Award 3: Creating Safe Urban Environments for Women - Safetipin (India) & Soul City Institute (South Africa)
Womanity Award 4: Call for pr oposals are now open! For more info click here.
The pairs are composed of an Innovation Partner - the organisation that has already developed a successful programme - and a Scale-Up Partner to contextualise, adapt and roll out the approach in a new location.
Our Womanity Award 3 recipients - Safetipin and Soul City Institute for Social Justice - were announced at the conference Tech4Dev: Voices of the Global South, in Lausanne, Switzerland.
The flagship app – My SafetiPin – places red, orange and green pins on digital city maps indicating which areas are the safest for women. The app uses pictures taken by taxis and crowdsourced data from volunteers to show how safe different areas of the cities are for women. Factors assessed include lighting, quality of walk/ cycle paths, gender balance in the streets and general feeling of safety. The app is currently being used by over 100,000 people in countries such as India, Kenya, Colombia, Indonesia and Vietnam.
The big data captured with the app will be shared with eThekwini’s municipal government, in South Africa, who will use it for their Safer Cities strategy. Our project aims to benefit women and girls further by advocating for long-term improvements in urban planning.
To adapt the Safetipin App to the local context, some of the first steps were to understand women’s experiences when using public transport and taxis, train volunteers to conduct safety
audits and collect data about the city’s infrastructure. It was also key to establish the multi-stakeholder partnerships that are critical to the implementation and sustainability of the project.
Some of their main achievements in 2019 were:
◼ Soul City conducted research in the communities where they work and the findings were used by Safetipin to build a new app platform that will be used to address women’s concerns about accessing pulbic transport.
◼ Establishment of multi-stakeholder partnerships, including representatives from Safe City Unit of eThekwini Municipality, the National Taxi Association, local organisations and volunteer groups.
◼ Capacity building of young women. In November 2019, the team from Safetipin India trained 30 programme volunteers to use the ‘My Safetipin’ app to audit public spaces.
◼ Taxi Drivers’ Training. Drivers were trained to use the ‘Safetipin Nite’app to collect night images of the street which will be critical to analyse the infrastructure of the city (i.e: lighting).
◼ Participation in the Africa Forum for Urban Safety (AFUS). Soul City and Safetipin were invited by the eThekwini municipality to present to mayors from many African cities and raise awareness about their work in South Africa.
◼ Organisational development of both Safetipin and Soul City. They finalised a detailed process of needs assessment of their organisational capacities and are working towards their institutional development.
◼ www.safetipin.com
◼ www.soulcity.org.za
Women Land Rights
T +41 22 544 39 60 | info@oldsite.womanity.org