Safe Mathare
Computer Software - Stanford, California, United States
Safe Mathare Employees
Safe Mathare Details
Safe Mathare is a platform for social enterprises that increase women's safety in Mathare.Women living in Mathare – one of Nairobi's largest informal settlements – are commonly the targets of assault, mugging and rape as they go about their daily activities. These threats are greatest outside of daylight hours, but women must often travel very early in the day or late in the evening as they commute to and from work, school, the market or community latrines.It is our mission to design and support initiatives that encourage safer commutes for women in Mathare.Our first project was a 3 month pilot, Makmende, that ran from December 2011 to February 2012. Makmende is a a system of community foot patrols that escort women along their daily commute. Using mobile technology to disseminate real-time information about the location of patrols, the system coordinates the formation of citizen-led walking groups that escort women safely to their final destinations.Since the pilot's conclusion, Safe Mathare is exploring how to iterate on new systems to keep women safe and encourage non-violent deterrents to assaults. We are soliciting more community input and ownership through Spring 2012. With increased partnerships in Mathare and Nairobi generally, Safe Mathare will aim to launch new women-safety initiatives later in the year.We believe that the projects generated on this platform will have great potential not only to improve the physical safety of women in Mathare, but also, by expanding the number of hours that they are able to securely travel outside the home, to improve their freedom of movement and general peace of mind.To read more about the Makmende pilot, please have a look at these documents.Course PresentationPre-Pilot Viability documentAlso see the article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review about our development and the Makmende pilot.
