Free local digital platform to talk about abuse with chatbot

A free local app where people can talk about and track abuse is getting a lot of international attention.

Called Gender Rights in Tech or GRIT, it includes a chatbot called Zuzi.

South African Leonora Tima created it after her 19-year-old relative who was nine months pregnant was murdered in Cape Town in 2020.

"Following the incident, I saw how complicated it was to access services and support," said Tima.

She said that one of the complexities of gender-based violence is that there's a lot of shame and stigma associated with it.

"Lots of people actually take quite a long time to want to talk to a person because they're scared of being judged, so what we found was that with a chatbot people are a lot more willing to open up and speak about it.

"And then what we have is human-in-the-loop, which is like the guardrail essentially.

That has certaintriggers, like if there's certain situations like child sexual assault or something like that - actually a human does kick in for safety reasons."

Suicide is also a trigger.

Tima said that every month they analysed the chats, which are all anonymised. "We go through all the conversations that have been had and look at trends, anything that hasn't been picked up, anything alarming."

Zuzi will soon go live on WhatsApp and Facebook.

To listen to Leonora Tima, MD of Gender Rights in Tech (GRIT) and CapeTalk's John Maytham click on the audio below.