Before StealthEnomics re-launched in October 2016, our senior executives made a commitment that the company would be significant and strive to matter beyond the metrics of profitability. So as we prepared for the re-launch we marinated on this question: “Other than ourselves, who has a stake in our business and what would society lose if our company were to shut down tomorrow?”

My name is Chris Bell, I serve as the COO for StealthEnomics. As we determined our role in society and in keeping with our company’s posture as conscious capitalists, we collaborated with #Firesidechat and UN Woman Ambassador Alysia Silberg to create and sponsor the StealthEnomics $25,000 Entrepreneurs Scholarship Award. We wanted this award to help one deserving entrepreneur build a business that would impact their community, the nation in which they live, and the world.

Of the many deserving entrepreneurs that applied, the winner of our StealthEnomics $25,000 Entrepreneurs Scholarship Award was ElsaMarie DiSilva, CEO of Safecity. Safecity is an online crowd-mapping platform (www.safecity.in) that tracks reports of sexual abuse and harassment. It converts the data into hotspots of unsafe areas on city maps and is headquartered in the Mumbai area of India. Here’s ElsaMarie D’Silva’s story about Safecity:

“Using existing open sourced software, my friends and I launched a platform called Safecity to document sexual violence in public spaces, and make the issue visible through crowdsourced, anonymous stories. Over a period of time, I realized that providing only an “online” solution was incomplete and that we had to raise awareness about the issue and engage people to use the data to rally their communities around the issue and hold their institutional service providers, like the police & municipal authorities, accountable.

To prove this model, I partnered with an NGO that was trying to mobilize communities around the issue of public safety. We were able to convince the police to change beat patrol timings and increase vigilance based on the crowdsourced data collected. This gave me confidence to replicate it across Delhi and Mumbai to address sexual violence which is a global pandemic affecting on an average 1 in 3 women at least once in their lifetime. Unfortunately, most women and girls do not talk about their experiences thus creating a gap between official statistics and daily reality. Through our crowdsourced data, we wish to make public spaces safer and equally accessible to all.

Since then we have grown to be the largest crowd map on sexual violence and are actively mapping in India, Kenya, Nepal and Cameroon. We have conducted awareness workshops on sexual violence and legal rights for over 10,000 people and have implemented campaigns in 8 neighborhoods in Delhi positively impacting the lives of over 10,000 families.

We would like to use this opportunity with StealthEnomics™ to scale our work, fine-tune our communications and ensure our processes are robust so that we can contribute towards ending violence against women and girls.

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