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SWEDEN: Safer and More Accessible Cities for All

SWEDEN

Safer and More Accessible Cities for All

21 May 2022  

The innovation camp “Safer and More Accessible Cities for All” was hosted by the Swedish Programme for ICT in Developing Regions (SPIDER) on 21 May 2022 with 10 participants.  

The organization of this innovation camp brought key learnings to the project: SPIDER originally planned to organize the event in March 2022 and had to postpone it due to low number of registrations. SPIDER decided to hold focus groups discussion with young women, to understand why they were not signing up despite their interest in the event. Their response was very revealing, illustrating all the insecurities that young women face when it comes to their ideas or innovations being taken seriously. They informed SPIDER about their self-doubt and whether the ideas they had would be of interest to anyone, after all “all I have is just an idea”.   

This statement alone really helped reinforce why EQUALS-EU is important in ensuring representation and inclusion for minority groups. This feedback also reinforced the project’s choice to ensuring that women, and non-binary persons were the target audience that were needed to support in this kind of activities. SPIDER took this into consideration for the organization of the event in May 2022 by rebranding the event and collaborating with the community organisation Rinkeby Folkets Hus (RFH).  

Winning team & solution:

Get Home Safely – A consolidated safety app for women and non-binary people in urban areas to enable users to “get home safely”  

© Suzanna Viswalingam (Community engagement), Helena Hede (Community engagement), Jamaad Mohamud (Stay at home mum), Maryan Said and Umal Balale 

Women feel insecure in urban environments today: harassment, unpredictable behaviour of others surrounding them… Their everyday lives are hence restricted. The winning team proposed a consolidated safety app for women and non-binary people in urban areas to enable users to “get home safely”. There are several public safety solutions out there, and the innovative aspect of this is that these would all be consolidated on one platform.