Every August, South Africa celebrates the achievements and resilience of women, with this year carrying even greater significance as the country marks 70 years since the historic 1956 Women’s March, when 20,000 women united to challenge laws that restricted their freedom of movement. For many, however, this month also brings an uncomfortable reminder that freedom is still experienced differently when you are a woman.
Ask almost any woman about going out at night to meet friends or on a first date, working late or travelling somewhere unfamiliar. They might speak about how they always let loved ones know where they are and what time they’ll be home, or how they’ve had to pretend to have a partner to avoid awkward advances from someone.
These behaviours have become so deeply ingrained that many women barely think about them anymore. They are simply part of moving through everyday life, but the unfortunate reality is that they exist for a reason. In fact, more than one in three South African women have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetime.
It takes a lot more than a single app or intervention to solve a societal crisis of this scale, but every industry that forms part of a woman’s daily life has a responsibility to ask what we can do to reduce the uncertainty women experience every day. And for those of us operating in mobility as an industry, this means paying closer attention to how we ensure women have greater confidence, visibility and control over every journey.
Safety begins long before the journey
In our research, women have consistently told us that feeling safe comes down to how they feel throughout the journey, and this is what has influenced product and app feature development since.
Finding the correct pickup point at a busy shopping centre, transport hub or office park may seem like a minor inconvenience, but uncertainty about where to wait can leave passengers spending longer than necessary in unfamiliar surroundings and may be potentially dangerous. To address this, inDrive recently introduced Panorama View, which provides a street-level image of the pickup location where available, alongside Recommended Pickup Points that guide passengers towards clearer meeting locations.
Knowing who is collecting you, whether you can travel with friends instead of alone, whether you don’t have to share your personal phone number and whether someone you trust can follow your journey remotely are all important factors too. The more informed and in control someone feels before, during and after a trip, the more confident they are likely to feel using the service.
Driver verification has become a standard expectation, giving passengers greater confidence that the person arriving matches the information shown in the app. Beyond that, passengers want simple ways to stay connected during a trip. With Share your ride, they can send a live link so someone can follow the journey in real time. With Trusted contacts, they can save the people who matter most and reach them in one tap if something feels off. Alongside this, in-app calling lets passengers and drivers coordinate without exposing personal phone numbers, and support is available whenever it’s needed.
The platform also offers different ride options depending on passengers’ needs, including an XL option that allows groups to travel together rather than splitting into separate vehicles. These aren’t new or groundbreaking for the industry, but sometimes removing small moments of uncertainty before they become stressful goes a long way.
Technology, however, is only one part of the solution. Creating safer environments for women requires a collective effort from government, law enforcement, businesses, urban planners and communities. Better lighting around transport hubs, safer public spaces, faster responses to reports of gender-based violence, stronger prosecution of offenders and continued education around respect and consent all have an equally important role to play. The responsibility cannot rest solely on women adapting their behaviour or on technology companies adding more features.
Women’s Month should ultimately challenge all of us to ask whether women feel as free to move through South Africa today as they should. For the mobility industry, this means continuing to listen to women’s experiences and recognising that every seemingly small improvement makes a difference, whether it helps someone feel more informed or simply experience one less moment of uncertainty on their journey.
By Ashif Black, Country Representative for South Africa at inDrive
