RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Architect and urban planner from Minas Gerais, Priscila Gama, 36 years old, has always been dissatisfied with the lack of safety and freedom of people, especially women, to move around in Brazilian cities.
“We were raised early to be afraid to walk alone in the street at night, but it shouldn’t be like that,” she says.
This perception, and the #MeuPrimeiroAssédio (#MyFirst Harassment) campaign, in 2015, of the Think Olga website – which encouraged women to expose reports of sexual harassment on social media -, made her think of a way to avoid this violence.
Reading the frightening and sad female accounts, she realized that many stories that happened in the streets had to do with urban displacement, with mobility. It was then that she came up with the idea of developing an app that would work as a virtual companion.
Launched the same year, Malalai, which refers to Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 for her fight for women’s right to education, has already been used by more than 30,000 people in the country.
As Priscila explains, the app works on three fronts. The first is preventive, with security information about the streets and a collaborative mapping of the best lit places, with commerce open and police stations.
The second leads to cognitive comfort. “It’s the feeling of being safe, the reason why we warn someone that we’re leaving somewhere and will be arriving at a certain time,” says the entrepreneur, recently awarded the ‘Gol Novos Tempos’ Award, which celebrates good urban mobility initiatives. The tool allows one to have their route monitored virtually.
And the third front is emergency, providing an emergency button that, when triggered, sends distress messages to three pre-selected trusted contacts. There is also an extra feature, a discreet ring that enables the use of the emergency button more quickly, via Bluetooth.
“Sexual violence is not widely discussed, it has a very low reporting rate, only ten percent of people report, and it is a taboo subject. Just to bring this up, the feedback is already positive”.
“The Malalai app is related to women’s freedom to come and go, to work, study and grow. I think we need to have the courage to explore the city and understand that it is our right,” concludes Priscila Gama, the innovative businesswoman who has been moving to make women’s foot traffic safer and more joyful.