Nigeria is witnessing a brand new generation of impact social entrepreneurs who are adopting new strategies to solve old daunting social problems. This effort is pioneered by Civic Hive with its Accelerator program that is designed to give opportunities to civic Tech startups. Locate, with its commitment to providing smart alternatives to finding missing persons is part of this acceleration.

Before now, there is has been no easy way to report a missing person, and even when such is reported it takes the state authorities 24 hours or more to initiate a search for the missing. In 24 hours, a kidnapped girl child would have crossed the borders to the nearby Benin Republic to be used as a sex slave or worst for ritual purposes. It is against this backdrop that Locate was born out of the need to build a missing person reporting system that can galvanize the power of the citizens to help in searching for the Missing.

As a crowdsourcing platform, Locate is building an easy, fast, and research-supported intervention that addresses the two most important reasons why it takes longer for a Missing Person to be found or never found at all. That is a reporting system and the initiation of the Instant search.

The acceptance of Locate into the Civic Hive accelerator program came at no better time as Nigeria stands in dire need of an intervention that can help in the search of our portion of the over 250,000 persons who go missing globally every year.  Over the course of the Acceleration, Locate has benefited from a bespoke program designed to provide the skills, advice, and contacts to help scale our socially conscious enterprise while backing up with a team of coaches, mentors, and access to a network of professionals, all thanks to Oluseun Onigbinde of BudgIT.

In October, Locate will be opened to provide citizen support services. According to the Lead Partner Locate, Ndukwe Ogbogu, “we will be working for the ordinary Nigerian citizens who cannot afford to employ the services of private security companies nor expensive Television advert while leveraging the power of technology to bypass channels that have hitherto been closed to the ordinary Nigerian, giving them the power to report their missing loved ones and be part of a proactive strategy that ensures their safe return”.