While visiting a few neighbourhoods north of Johannesburg recently, I came to the conclusion that South Africa’s high crime rate has spawned a whole new industry of security solutions that are digital technology enabled, in full use at access points of all of the high-end gated communities.
Unitehood, a GPS-based crowdsourcing mobile app launched by a South African mobile developer in November 2013, is yet another solution meant to sound an alarm when crime is experienced or witnessed by registered users.
Unitehood App – December 2013
Dirk Grobbelaar, the co-founder of Unitehood, explains how this crime-busting app works as follows: “When something happens, for instance a burglary, you press the red panic button. After a 5 second countdown, it automatically sends an emergency call to the relevant emergency service you have pre-programmed, such as the police or your security company. In addition, the app sends a signal to all people who have Unitehood installed on their phone and who are in a 5 km radius of where you are.”
Clearly, the South African security industry is at its most innovative, taking advantage of the stubbornly high levels of crime.
Coincidentally, I had a friend visiting from Kenya in early December, and he remarked how everyone kept to themselves in my gated community, and I suspect this is the case in many such environments in this city, if not this whole country. My Kenyan friend wondered how the high crime spoken about is combated where next-door neighbours hardly know one another. In turn, this made me wonder whether Unitehood will work as effectively as it is meant to under these circumstances?
My friend informed me that the Kenyan government most recently issued a decree that a community policing initiative called Nyumba Kumi – a Swahili phrase loosely translated as “know your neighbours” – must be implemented to encourage groups of minimum 11 neighbours living close by to get to know one another, emphasising the two fundamental rules of security as being vigilance and looking out for one another. Apparently this initiative has been implemented successfully in many countries including Tanzania, Rwanda and even Norway. Time will tell if Kenya will also get it right.
It is worth mentioning that Kenya is counted amongst the most developed digital technology markets on the continent, but the government saw it fit to resort to the simplest form of improving person-to-person relations. Question is, could Kenya have done a better job with a crime-busting app like South Africa? Yeah, only time will tell whether digital technology solutions such as Unitehood are the answer to human relations issues like combating crime.
ABOUT THIS BLOG | ABOUT THE BLOGGER | LATEST QUICK DIGI-TIP
