Vital Voices pays homage to past Global Leadership Awards honoree: Elsa Marie D’Silva

As we approach the 22nd Annual Global Leadership Awards on October 25, Vital Voices is bringing you an update on a few of our remarkable past honorees, starting with…

Elsa Marie D’Silva, a 2017 Global Leadership Awards honoree, has been steadfastly advancing her mission to create safer public spaces through her visionary initiatives at Red Dot Foundation and its digital platform SafeCity, which crowdsources individual experiences of sexual violence and abuse in public spaces.

“In the past year, Red Dot Foundation Global has partnered with 10 Vital Voices leaders to implement Safecity in their cities and communities. They have been advocating for safer spaces for women and children, as well as working with institutional service providers on violence reduction,” reports D’Silva. “The service providers include mayors and local government agencies, police departments, transport officials, and religious leaders. This has resulted in a direct uptake of local violence prevention services and legal remedies at community centers. In total, more than 1 million citizens have been engaged in creating safer cities using the SafeCity platform, which is available in 12 languages,” says D’Silva.

SafeCity has become the largest crowd-sourced map on the issue of gender-based violence in India and abroad since it launched in 2012.

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Written by the Communications Team at Vital Voices