Setting up of a Kenya National Domestic Violence Call Center (K-NDVCC): Prototype and Pilot Implementation

Domestic violence can involve men to women, men to children, women to children and sometimes women to men. Domestic violence in Kenya is mostly prevalent in middle-income and lower-income levels of the society. In this paper, a prototype system is implemented to administer and manage a national domestic violence call center. This is a GIS-based call center system supporting distress calls by: (i) automatically identifying callers’ locations, (ii) Quickly assessing accurate spatial information from its database about nearby advocate resources and reporting back to the caller, the identified advocate, and (iii) publishing maps in Keyhole Markup Language for viewing in software supporting open standards such as Google Earth. The system was validated using sample data collected from Juja location. This prototype shows promise of being able to offer rapid and timely responses to domestic violence (and other) distress requests utilizing geospatially enabled technologies.