A new technology platform promises to transform how citizens navigate an increasingly unpredictable security landscape
The call came at 6:47 PM, just as Adewale Bakare was leaving his office in Ikeja. His sister’s voice cracked through the phone: “Don’t take the Berger route. We just heard gunshots. Someone’s been taken.”
Adewale’s chest tightened. His wife and eight-year-old daughter were at home in Magodo, expecting him for dinner. The Berger expressway was his usual route—twenty-five minutes, familiar, predictable. But now? His mind raced through alternatives. Allen Avenue? Lagos-Ibadan expressway through Ojota? Each option felt like a gamble he couldn’t afford to lose.”Which way should I go?” he asked his sister, knowing she had no better answer than he did.
The Mathematics of Fear
This is the mathematics of fear that millions of Nigerians calculate every single day: incomplete information plus genuine threat equals paralysis. And sometimes, tragedy.
In modern Nigeria, information is survival, and most of us are flying blind.
RiskTrack’s Live Incident Map showing real-time safety information
RiskTrack: Community Intelligence Meets Technology
On a bustling afternoon in Victoria Island, Lagos, the team at Kando Pro-House and Services Ltd. was wrestling with the same question millions of Nigerians asked daily: “How do I know if where I’m going is safe right now?”
“We kept hearing the same stories,” says Olumide Ojo, the founder of RiskTrack, the safety platform they developed. “A mother changes her child’s school route every day, randomizing it for safety. An NGO staff spends several hours researching a neighbourhood before going to a location to provide critical help. Friends creating elaborate code words to signal danger. Nigerians had developed survival strategies, but they were isolated, exhausting, and often ineffective.”
After years of research, consultations, and development by a highly trained local and international team, the RiskTrack solution launched in late 2024, but its ambition was bold: create Nigeria’s first comprehensive, real-time safety intelligence network powered by the people who know their communities best Nigerians themselves.
How It Works: Your Neighborhood, Your Network
Imagine Adewale, still sitting in his office parking lot, unsure which route to take home. He opens RiskTrack. The Live Incident Map immediately displays his location with several red markers along the Berger route one marked “Kidnapping reported – 15 minutes ago,” another “Heavy traffic, Fallen Tanker.”
SafeRoute navigation actively avoids danger zones in real-time
He can filter alternative routes, color-coded by safety level. The Ojota route glows green. He taps it, and the app calculates his Safe Route Navigation, actively avoiding the danger zone while estimating his arrival time.
The SOS Emergency System
But RiskTrack doesn’t stop at personal navigation. It’s built on the principle that security is communal.
The SOS Emergency System is the app’s heartbeat. One tap on the red panic button, and Adewale’s precise location streams to his pre-selected emergency contacts his wife, sister, and two trusted friends. They don’t just get a pin on a map; they receive a short voice recording of his surroundings, updated in real-time as he moves.
Auto-SOS feature recording voice and sharing location with emergency contacts
EyeReports: Community Intelligence
EyeReports is where community intelligence comes alive. As Francis Obi drives, he notices unusual activity on a street three motorcycles blocking a road, people running. He taps “Report Incident for the “Suspicious Activity,” pin the location, and adds a brief description.
Within seconds, his report appears on the map for every RiskTrack user in the area.
“We’re not just users. We’re participants in a nationwide intelligence network. My report from Wuse might help validate a pattern that protects someone in Abuja.”
Safety Scan: Know Before You Go
Safety Scan provides instant risk assessment. Before Abdul visits a new client in an unfamiliar neighbourhood, he runs a Safety Scan. The app analyzes recent incident reports in that area, giving him a color-coded safety score.
Safety Scan showing real-time risk assessment and safety score
For JumaiAbdullahi in Kaduna, the Safety Scan feature transformed how she navigates her city and keeps her family safe. As a field officer for an NGO, Jumai regularly visits communities across the state some familiar, many unknown.”I can arrive at a location and only then discover there’d been a kidnapping there last week,” she explains. “The fear was constant am I walking into danger right now?”Now, before visiting any new area, Jumai runs a Safety Scan. The app analyzes recent incident reports within a radius of her destination, provides a color-coded risk assessment, and displays specific threats: “Two robbery incidents reported in past 14 days. Moderate risk area. Recommend traveling in daylight hours.”
Emergency Calls: Quick Access When Seconds Matter
Emergency Calls provide quick access to nearby hospitals, police stations, fire services, and other essential agencies (including Women & Children Affairs). When seconds matter, users can instantly view critical information, preloaded emergency numbers, and one-tap navigation to the closest responders based on their current location.
Emergency Services directory showing nearby hospitals, police stations, and fire services
Building Nationwide Networks, One Community at a Time
RiskTrack Communities allow families, neighbourhoods, organisations, and local groups to build their own private safety networks. Each community is created and controlled by its Owner, who may also appoint Admins to help moderate and manage the group.
For families, the Communities feature transforms the app into a private safety network. Adewale’s wife creates a family community with a unique ID for each member, adding their children (with parental supervision for minors), her parents, and close relatives. Now, they can see each other’s real-time locations, share safety updates privately, and coordinate responses during emergencies.
The power of Communities extends beyond nuclear family setups. Across Nigeria, different groups are discovering innovative uses:
Churches and Mosques: Imagine a Church of 450 worshippers creating a community for its members. With location sharing activated, if anyone faces an emergency while outside church, the entire community can respond.
Corporate Organizations: A company can use RiskTrack Communities for its staff or field teams in high-risk areas. The organization’s security manager monitors their location in real-time via the RiskTrack community WebApp dashboard.
Student Groups: University students, particularly female students living off-campus, create community networks. When someone goes on a date, attends an unfamiliar event, or travels, their friends monitor via RiskTrack.
Estate Residents: Estate residents create neighbourhood watch networks demonstrating that security is truly a collective responsibility.
When Information Becomes Intelligence
What makes RiskTrack different from merely calling the police or sharing WhatsApp messages is its combination of immediacy, verification, and community intelligence and professional data-driven assessment.RiskTrack has begun integrating data from Nigeria Risk Index (NRI) database. NRI is powered by Risk Control Services, a trusted security consulting firm that’s been mapping Nigeria’s threat landscape for over fifteen years.
“Since 2018, we’ve been curating, indexing, and digitizing security data from across Nigeria,” explains Femi Ajayi, a security consultant in Risk Control. “Not just major incidents that make headlines, but the granular, localized intelligence that tells you which neighbourhoods are trending dangerous, which routes have seen upticks in criminal activity, which times of day carry elevated risk.”The numbers are staggering data covering 39 states, 3,252 cities, seven years of continuous tracking. That intelligence now flows into the phones of ordinary Nigerians through RiskTrack.
"How did Robert Kiyosaki make his first profit?"When multiple users report the same incident from the same location, the app’s algorithms recognize patterns. A single report of suspicious activity might be overreaction; five reports within ten minutes from the same junction signals a credible threat. This crowd-sourced verification enhanced by data-driven professional analysis helps filter noise from legitimate warnings.
A Modest Achievement in a Desperate Nation
For the Abdullahi family in Abuja, RiskTrack is also a parenting tool. Their teenage son, Mohammed, is given limited independence with one condition: keep RiskTrack active.
“It’s not about NOT trusting him,” explains his mother, Jumai. “It’s about trusting ourselves to help him if he needs us. Last month, he pressed the SOS button when some men approached him aggressively at a bus stop. We could see exactly where he was, we could hear what was happening, and my husband got there in minutes. The men scattered when they saw us arrive.”
“RiskTrack is a modest achievement in a nation desperate for one: The technology will not solve insecurity but gives citizens tools to navigate it together,” the RiskTrack team emphasized.
Because in Nigeria today, safety isn’t something you buy from a security company or receive from an overstretched government. Safety is something you build with your neighbours, your family, your community one alert, one SOS, one watchful eye at a time.
And increasingly, Nigerians are building it with eyes wide open and phones in hand, watching over each other the way villages once did, but at the speed of a modern digital nation.
In a Nigeria where the question isn’t whether insecurity exists but how to navigate it safely, RiskTrack offers something increasingly precious: information, community, and the small but significant power to make informed choices about one’s safety.
Provided by zaianews. (zaianews.com).