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Twenty-one-year-old Halimat Onize Abdulazeez, a graduate of Civil Engineering from Nile University, Abuja, has designed an app for mobile phones to ensure rapid response for victims of insecurity and mitigate dangers during emergencies.
The app named Limbuzz was designed to ensure real help comes immediately for Nigerians who find themselves in danger.
According to Halimat, studying Civil engineering shaped her thought process about problems and breaking things down, understanding systems, and building solutions that actually hold up under pressure.
She explained that, as a Civil Engineer who thinks in terms of structures, systems, and infrastructure, the more she looked around Nigeria, the more she realised that one of the country’s biggest missing pieces wasn’t a physical structure but a lack of a functioning emergency response infrastructure that ensures a real-time coordination system connecting people in danger to people who can help.
‘’That felt like an engineering problem to me, just not the kind you build with concrete and steel. It’s the kind you build with code, with networks, with coordination. So I moved from designing physical infrastructure to designing safety infrastructure. Tech just became the material I needed to build it with,’’ she said.
Halimat disclosed that she was inspired to create Limbuzz because of the traumatic experiences Nigerians who find themselves in Nigeria go through.
‘’I kept noticing the same pattern everywhere: when something goes wrong in Nigeria- robbery, an accident, a medical emergency- people don’t call for official help first. They call a family member. Not because they trust family more, but because they’ve quietly stopped expecting real help to come in time.
‘’That broke something in me. It meant millions of people have accepted that they’re on their own in their most dangerous moments. I wanted to build something that changes that, not by waiting for the system to fix itself, but by connecting the resources that already exist, private security, ambulances, government response units- into one system that actually works when someone needs it most’’ she said.
On how the app works, Halimat explained it is built around something called a dual-response model that enables someone who is in danger to press one button on the app to activate real-time help.
‘’ Two things happen immediately. First, the alert goes to a private response partner, a security team, or an ambulance service, which is contracted to get to them quickly. At the same time, the nearest government emergency unit, police, fire service, or medical, is notified with the exact location. So, the person gets speed from the private side and official backup from the government side, both at once. It also works offline through SMS in case there’s no internet connection, because in a real emergency, that’s often the first thing that fails.’’
She expressed confidence that Limbuzz has significant advantages over other security features on mobile phones because it goes beyond notifying emergency contacts by facilitating the dispatch of real and trained responders as well as activating government emergency services to guarantee official awareness and backup.
