GBG Case Study

Google Maps helps Indian non-profit Safecity protect and empower women

About Safecity

• safecity.in • Bombay, India • Safecity documents personal stories of sexual harassment in public spaces and aggregates the data as hotspots on a map • 6 employees and up to 50 volunteers • Launched in December 2012

Safecity is an Indian non-profit social organization working to empower women and counter gender-based violence. Its mission is to raise awareness of sexual harassment, which is part of everyday life for many Indian women, and ultimately, to break the cycle. By encouraging people to share experiences, they can then aggregate the data in the form of hotspots on a map and identify location-based trends to create neighborhood solutions. Since the initiative was launched in December 2012, Safecity has gathered almost 4,000 stories from over 50 cities and has run workshops for 1,200 people, some as young as nine. Today, Safecity’s three co-founders are supported by three full-time staff and up to 50 volunteers across the country who work on stories, social media and campaigns. The Internet is key to the success of Safecity, enabling the initiative to reach people across the whole of India. Because the team is based in different locations nationwide, Google Hangouts is a key tool for keeping in touch. Using Google Maps, Safecity aggregates anonymous location-based reports of harassment crowdsourced from members of the public and publishes them on its platform. Stories are also shared on YouTube. When the global Safecity mobile app comes out at the end of this year, it will be modelled on community-based traffic and navigation app Waze.

““By reaching out, we’re seeing a trend where more people are prepared to share stories.” ”

— Elsa Marie D’Silva, Managing Director, Safecity

As Safecity managing director and co-founder Elsa Marie D’Silva explains, the app will “make data about areas where harassment can happen more accessible to individuals and help them take precautions. On a larger scale, we’re gathering data about harassment that has never been collected before and offering this to other NGOs. We’re also encouraging communities to start their own initiatives to keep safe. By reaching out, we’re seeing a trend where more people are prepared to share stories. We want to become the largest database for this issue.” © 2014 Google Inc. All rights reserved. Google and the Google logo are trademarks of Google Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.