Nigeria is witnessing a brand new generation of impact social
entrepreneurs who are adopting new strategies to solve old daunting social
problems. This effort is pioneered by Civic Hive with its Accelerator program
that is designed to give opportunities to civic Tech startups. Locate with its
commitment in providing smart alternatives to finding missing persons is part
of this acceleration.
Before now, there is has been no easy way to report a missing
person, and even when such is reported it takes the sta authorities 24 hours or
more to initiate a search for the missing. In 24 hours, a kidnapped girl child
would have crossed the borders to the nearby Benin Republic to be used as a sex
slave or worst for ritual purposes. It is against this backdrop that Locate was
born out of the need to build a missing person reporting system that can
galvanize the power of the citizens to help in searching for the Missing.
As a crowdsourcing platform, Locate is building an easy, fast and
research- supported intervention that addresses the two most important reasons why
it takes longer for a Missing Person to be found or never found at all. That is
a reporting system and the initiation of the Instant search.
The acceptance of Locate into the Civic Hive accelerator program
came at no better time as Nigeria stands in dire need of an intervention that
can help in the search of our portion of the over 250,000 persons who go
missing globally every year. Over the
course of the Acceleration, Locate has benefited from a bespoke program
designed to provide the skills, advice, and contacts to help scale our socially
conscious enterprise while backing up with a team of coaches, mentors, and
access to a network of professionals, all thanks to Oluseun Onigbinde of
BudgIT.
In October, Locate will be opened to provide citizen support
services. According to the Lead Partner, Locate Ndukwe, Ogbogu, “we will be
working for the ordinary Nigerian citizens who cannot afford to employ the
services of private security companies nor expensive Television advert while
leveraging the power of technology to bypass channels that have hitherto been
closed to the ordinary Nigerian, giving them the power to report their missing
loved ones and be part of a proactive strategy that ensures their safe return”.
Culled from: civichive.org
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