There were twenty cars fitted with Namola tablets, and a parade of 33 officers who recently attended Namola training at a local army base.
Executive Mayor of the Lesedi Local Municipality, Lerato Maloka, addressed the crowd and encouraged the audience to stretch their imaginations to visualise a world where committing a crime would be almost impossible because of technological innovation.
Namola chief ambassador Yusuf Abramjee followed the mayor and spoke about the project's bright future. “We are delighted today to officially launch the pilot project. We are also talking to the leadership of the South African Police Service and hopefully, very soon we'll be able to take it to the 10111 centres.”
Gauteng community safety MEC Sizakele Nkosi-Malobane reiterated the message and encouraged community members to download Namola saying that “for some time there has been an outcry about response time in our communities” and that Namola would help to reduce this response time dramatically.
The severity of the impact of South Africa's high crime rate on those living in low-income communities cannot be overestimated. With no access to infrastructures like transport, working street lights, and private security, these communities are hardest hit by our country's crime epidemic.
The Namola app is described as a unique solution to South Africa's crime problem because it uses technology to put the power to create positive change in the hands of citizens.
Namola was designed by Happimo, a non-profit organisation, to be inclusive and is accessible to anybody with a GPS-enabled smartphone. A press of a button dispatches the nearest emergency responders to the citizen's GPS coordinates and has been shown to be 11x faster than conventional systems. The system also allows for live tracking of vehicles and alerts to improve accountability and responsiveness.
Reporting an emergency via the app will trigger a call from the Namola call centre so be sure to answer the call when testing or an emergency vehicle will be sent to your location.
For more, go to www.namola.com
