It is a well-known fact that road accidents kill a lot of Cameroonians. Statistics from a World Bank report published in 2014 shows that road accidents were among the leading cause of death in Cameroon.. The sickening issue here isn’t that road accidents are disproportionately high in Cameroon and Africa in general, but that when these accidents occur, emergency services either arrive late at the scene of the accident, or don’t go at all. This leaves victims in the hands of people who know little or nothing about first aid. Most of these victims die on their way to the hospital.

Achiri Arnold Nji, a 27 year old Cameroonian, wants to do something about this problem. According to him, he was inspired by the humanitarian works of Peter Drucker and he strongly believes that with a robust system in transport and information in Africa, road accidents and emergency response can be ameliorated.

He created an app called Traveler to fix the problem.

Traveler is a mobile phone app which monitors the speed, location and number of passengers on a bus, and with the help of big data and machine intelligence alerts drivers and authorities to potential dangers. The system automatically sends high speed alerts each time a given bus runs above regulatory speed limits. This helps reduce over speeding which is responsible for over 70 percent of highway accidents in Cameroon. In the unfortunate case of an accident, the app notifies emergency services and families of victims. The app also empowers people with no prior knowledge of first aid at the scene of an accident to give lifesaving assistance to victims in the absence of trained emergency personnel.

The app is free to the ordinary Cameroonian who travels every day, and it can only notify families of people who register their journeys.

Traveler is a road safety app that uses big data to track user’s journeys and contact emergency teams when an accident occurs. We also automatically notify friends and relatives of victims.

Traveler wants to be a passenger monitoring tool in their travels; allowing them to report susceptibles problems which may arise: Speeding, wrong overtaking, wrong parking, accident, …; information that will be redirected to the authorities and competent people (relatives of the victims, agencies, law enforcement, emergency medical centers, …); this with the goal of making our roads safer and healthier.

Traveler is made up of two apps that can do the same thing – one for transport companies and the other for passengers. The passenger app’s role is to permit passengers register their journeys for free so that during an emergency, friends and family are contacted automatically (for free).

Traveler also has a monitor that tracks the speed, position and performance of all buses registered in the system and automatically rates all drivers of public transport buses.

Traveler is not the only app in this space. But according to the creator, the app is unique when compared to competitors on these two specific areas.

We track interurban public transport buses and connect passengers to families, and hospitals automatically. We automatically record the location, speed, bus number and number of passengers in a bus and forward this information to road safety teams, each time a driver of a bus drives above recommended speed limits. We have made it possible to use ‘big data analytics’ to monitor the performance of drivers on the highway and give them advice concerning events susceptible to cause an accident. We literarily can predict an accident based on a driver’s speed/location coefficient (big data).

Our app provides a guide on how survivors of road accidents can take care of themselves while waiting for emergency teams. our app also provides a guide through which people with no knowledge in first aid can assist and transport victims of road accidents to nearby hospitals in the absence of emergency teams, without worsening the medical situation of the said victims. Where on earth has a phone app been developed to tackle effectively road accidents and the problems associated with them? Road accidents are the leading cause of death in the world, and a bulk (90%) of all victims (51.3 million per year) occurs in developing countries!

If you are in Cameroon, you can download the app here.