{{ PG.h1 }}

Friends first. Founders second.

These are couples who have known each other for years — families who eat together, worship together and do business together. The conversation that became Panic GBVF was not a pitch meeting. It was the women in the room saying, plainly, that they did not feel safe, and that the women they work alongside in Alexandra, Soweto, Tembisa and Polokwane feel far less safe than that.

The men in the room happened to run telecommunications networks, funds, accounting practices and township enterprises. So the question stopped being someone should do something and became what exactly can we build.

The structure followed the conversation. The ladies are the founders of this initiative — they hold the vision and the mandate. The husbands are the co-founders, backing up the concept with the technology, capital and networks to make it real. Not in front. Behind.

Jean-Pierre (JP) Schmidtke

WIRE-WIRE NETWORKS · CO-FOUNDER

Sponsor of this initiative, and the technology behind it.

JP Schmidtke's Wire-Wire Networks came in as sponsor and technology sponsor, with his partners Wayne Edwards and Hendrik Opperman giving full backing to the ladies of our lives.

As telecommunications specialists we understand this pandemic differently: an alert is a packet, and a packet that does not arrive is a person who does not get help.

Beta IQ builds the platform

The three apps — the victim app, Respond and Command — are engineered by Beta IQ, headed by Senthil Naicker and Percyval Gonde as head and lead developers. They are the people who turn the founders' mandate into software that has to work at three in the morning, on a low-end handset, on a bad network.

Wire-Wire Networks sponsors that work. Beta IQ does it.

Simangele Mgidi

Every movement needs a voice. For Panic GBVF, that voice belongs to Simangele Mgidi. She has dedicated her life to uplifting families and supporting vulnerable members of society, and she owns and leads a church in Alexandra Township.

Through that work she has witnessed both the devastating impact of gender-based violence and the incredible resilience of women who keep fighting for safer futures. While Panic GBVF was founded by a collective of women and supported by their families, Simangele emerged as the unifying voice capable of bringing together community leaders, faith-based organisations, business professionals, technologists and ordinary citizens around a single mission.

To ensure that no woman faces danger alone.