Lagos unveils mobile app for sexual, gender-related case management

The Lagos State Domestic and Sexual Violence Agency has launched a mobile app and web portal for stakeholders to track, monitor, and manage gender-related cases in the state.

The agency said the Lagos DSVCMS app is available on Android, iOS, and Web Apps to help relevant agencies provide seamless and faster service delivery to victims of sexual and other gender-based crimes in the state.

The Executive Director of the agency, Titilola Rhodes-Vivour, disclosed this on Monday,  at a “Case Conference Meeting/Onboarding of Relevant Responder Agencies on the DSVCMS” held  in Lagos.

While onboarding and training members of the major responder agencies, such as the police, medical doctors, health workers, and social workers, on the app, Rhodes-Vivour noted that the old manual process slowed down the process of the sexual and gender based violence cases, hence the need for digital transformation.

She said, “Given the need to standardize our response mechanisms in Lagos State, the Joint EU-UN Spotlight initiative provided support to the Lagos State Government through the development of the Lagos State Domestic and Sexual Violence Unified Response Protocol and Referral Pathway Document (the first of its kind in Nigeria), which was ratified in 2021.

“As you would please appreciate, at the moment, the handling and management of sexual and gender-based violence cases, end to end, is done manually.

“From the filling of complaint forms to printing referral letters to other referral/responder agencies, dispatching letters, following up on cases, and other related manual processes, This therefore slows down the process of providing services, especially as sexual and gender violence responders are duty-bound to respond to incidents timeously.”

Speaking during the training, the Head of Case Management of the state agency, Oluwatumininu Ojo, noted that the portal was designed for the agencies responsible for managing the SGBV cases in the state.

She said, “People that play roles in the SGBV are on-boarded with the portal. It is a portal that anybody can have access to. If you don’t have any service to render, you don’t have any business with the portal.