About
Sisonke means 'we are together'. The premise is simple: when something goes wrong, the people closest to you are usually the ones who can reach you first.
The problem
In much of South Africa, the gap between an emergency starting and help arriving is measured in tens of minutes. A call has to be placed, an address described, a vehicle dispatched. In a hijacking, a medical crisis or an assault, the person in trouble often cannot speak, cannot describe where they are, and does not have those minutes.
Meanwhile the people who could help — a neighbour, a community patroller, a private security vehicle two streets away, a family member — have no idea anything is happening.
What we built
Sisonke Alert closes that gap with one gesture. Press and hold the panic button, choose what kind of emergency it is, and the app broadcasts your identity, your emergency type and your live position to responders registered nearby and to the trusted contacts you chose. Your location keeps updating until you mark yourself safe, so help can follow you if you have to move.
Everything else is deliberately absent. There is no feed, no profile to fill in, no advertising, no tracking between emergencies. The app reads your location at the moment you ask for help and stops the moment you say you are safe.
What we are not
We are not an emergency service, and we are careful never to imply otherwise. Sisonke Alert notifies people. It does not dispatch police, paramedics or firefighters, and it cannot guarantee that anyone responds. It is a layer on top of the official services, never a replacement for them. We set this out plainly on the Safety and limitations page, and we would rather lose a user to that honesty than have someone rely on us when they should be dialling 10111.
Where we are
Sisonke Alert is in active development, working toward a pilot with a small number of South African communities. The core emergency flow — panic button to live map — works end to end on real devices today. We are building out authentication, notifications and the responder network before opening the pilot more widely.
If you want to be part of it, join the pilot list.
Who builds it
Sisonke Alert is developed and operated by Tredicik (Pty) Ltd, a South African software company, in partnership with its founder. Privacy and data protection are handled under South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act — read exactly what we collect and why in the Privacy policy.