27-year-old Arnold Achiri Nji, inventor and Chief Executive Officer of ‘Traveler’, a road safety application, says that road accidents are the leading cause of death in Cameroon, with reckless drivers killing more than malaria and HIV/AIDS combined, and four times more than militant group, Boko Haram.

The young Electrical Engineer graduate of the Advanced School of Engineering, Yaounde, started thinking of curbing road accidents in 2015 when he noticed the inability to notify families when accidents occur. ‘Traveler’ is a mobile application that monitors the speed, location and number of passengers in a vehicle. With the help of big data, it alerts the driver and authorities to potential dangers. In the unfortunate case of an accident, the app notifies emergency services and the families of victims.

Traveler’ empowers first responders who have no First Aid knowledge to assist victims by giving them basic emergency service advice. With 500 users already, the app is gaining momentum since its launch on November 24, 2016. The innovator, Arnold Achiri, is a social entrepreneur and one of the winners of the Empowering People Award organized by Siemens Stiftung. He is also a winner of the African Entrepreneurship Award organized by BMCE Bank of Africa.

Arnold Achiri is also gunning for the prestigious « Africa Prize for Engineering Innovations » organized by the Royal Academy of Engineering in the UK. “The app is free and available on Google Play Store. We intend to use it all over Africa, but we must start from Cameroon. We are working on the version for iPhones.”