Meet the Founder of EppMe App, a Platform that’s Set to Revolutionalise How Citizens Report Crimes in Nigeria

Security has for long been a challenge in Nigeria. Although the country boasts of millions of security personnel scattered in all states, getting in touch with them in the face of danger or when a crime is being perpetrated has remained impossible. Most time, what obtains is paying a visit to their stations, and at that time, the criminal would have carted away.

This challenge is what caught the attention of Wole Aguda, leading to the launch of EppMe App.

In this interview, he tells us more about the app and how it’ll tackle crime in Nigeria.

Tell us about the EppMe App?

An app designed to be the most convenient way to report crimes in Nigeria. We have in our hands today, easy phone taps to comprehensive reporting.

A phone call cannot provide GPS coordinates of a crime location. A text message cannot provide satellite imagery of a crime scene. The EppMe app can do all of these with just a few taps on the phone. We believe that it will revolutionize how citizens and communities report crimes.

What inspired the idea for it?

Came from extensive use of Uber in the U.S. a few years ago. I thought about how Uber smartly determines locations via GPS and so we applied to run a GPS switchboard in Nigeria.

So it is an end-to-end process that speedily processes data obtained from profiles in a database against all the full-fledged functionalities of the EppMe app.

How does the platform work?

A user selects an emergency option on the App and submits. In about 10 – 15 seconds, the EppMe App produces a comprehensive report detailing:

• User profile
• Incident report
• Photo or video of incident if included
• Roads and routes to incident location
• Satellite imagery and more.

On the emergency reporting part, how have you been able to bring the Nigerian police into this, given the fact that they’ve not become so tech-savvy? Are they alerted once an emergency is reported?

A link is instantly sent to the Police Command while our Agents follow up on the report. The other scenario is if the user checks in via the Remote  Reporter. Same mechanism applies.

The Police

The journey to a sound technological basis for crime management even for the police is helped by such interventions as the EppMe app.

There are issues we agree but we have to jumpstart the process by some means. The police gets instant notification once a user of the EppMe App sends an emergency. We have began a journey that gets better over time we believe.

How is the Remote Reporter for businesses different from apps like Slack that enables connect with employees and monitor work progress remotely?

Slack does not combine the effectiveness of our Remote Reporting feature with Emergency Response. Ours is security and business. So while employees can send reports from the field back, they can get protective cover if they report threats to life via the EppMe App.

We noticed the EppMe App costs N2950 for android users, and N2999 for iOS users. Why is there a fee attached to the app?

Our app has a dynamic location detection system that is integrated with a global communications service. This is what enables automatic adjustments to the nearest police command to the user of the App. The user who moves from Abakaliki to Jigawa is automatically connected to the Jigawa Police Command for instance while the user in Oshogbo who moves to Calabar gets automatically connected to the Cross Rivers State Police Command. This is a subscription based service that is serviced in Dollars and which comes at just standard basic cost to users.

Police commands get instant notification before our follow up calls and these processes have fees that accompany their efficiency. We bear more of the costs for now however.

Since kick-off, how has the response been from Nigerians?

Response has been good. Of course mixed with doubts about the capacity of the Police to provide the needed response. We are dealing with a very low level of trust from people but we also try to make them understand that the Police are making strides at improvements.

What are the challenges you faced getting the app running, and how did you overcome them?

We have a clear cut plan and strategy that anticipated many of the challenges that we might encounter along the way. Our preparation made the process a whole lot easier than imagined.

We had series of fixes in the course of testing different features of the app and this took up up to 3 months in some instances. We are however happy at what we have achieved today.

Tell us the story behind your foray into entrepreneurship?

This began many years ago when I realised that the opportunities to expand innovation in Nigeria was almost limitless.

Our local challenges remain veritable opportunities for solutions ad unique interventions. Condolences.ng was created to fill a gap for instance and since then we have decided to continue to create solutions in this labyrinth of opportunities we call Nigeria.