Safetipin — Crowdsourced Safety Audits Turning Women's Perceptions of Public Space Into Government Action

Founded in Delhi in 2013 by Kalpana Viswanath and ElsaMarie D'Silva, Safetipin runs a mobile app and a structured 'Safety Audit' methodology letting women and researchers score public spaces on lighting, openness, visibility, walkability, security presence and transport access, layering results onto public maps.

The tool has been used in more than 30 cities across India, Colombia, Kenya and elsewhere, generating well over 150,000 individually scored locations. In Delhi, Safetipin Nite night-time audits identified 7,483 poorly lit 'dark spots', feeding into the city government's Mukhya Mantri Street Light Yojana and an inter-departmental lighting task force.

By 2018 around 70% of flagged locations in Delhi had been relit. In Bogota, the transport authority used Safetipin Nite data to prioritise lighting and CCTV installation along roughly 400km of the city's bike-path network, and Delhi Police have used the unsafe-area data to help plan patrol-van routes.

Independent academic research analysing Safetipin data from Bogota, Nairobi and Delhi has statistically linked the audit's physical-infrastructure indicators -- especially lighting and openness -- to women's perceived safety, and Cities Alliance has funded and publicly documented the programme's multi-city scale-up since 2014.