Skip to content
Siddiqee Shrestha

Work

MunAlert

Amber Alert Bangladesh - a missing-children tracking platform, developed over a four-year collaboration with Sadat Rahman, winner of the 2020 International Children's Peace Prize.
Role
Web developer - built the web infrastructure
Dates
2022 - present
Status
Live

The problem

When a child goes missing in Bangladesh, the information that would find them is held by the family, and the people who could act on it are strangers within a few kilometres. There is no mechanism that connects the two quickly. By the time a case moves through the channels that exist, the window that mattered has closed.

What I built

The web infrastructure the platform runs on: the public-facing surface where a case is published and circulated, and the system behind it that law enforcement works with. It operates in partnership with CID Bangladesh and the Bangladesh Police.

The decision

The part worth reading about.

The requirement was not features, it was that it works at 3am

Most products can afford a bad day. This one cannot. An alert platform is used at the worst moment of someone's life, by a person who has never opened it before, often on a cheap Android phone on a weak connection, and it either loads or it fails a family.

That constraint decided nearly everything. The public surface stays small, fast and legible over slow mobile data, and the feature list stayed short on purpose, because every addition is a new way for the thing to be broken on the night it is needed.

Four children have been located through the platform. That number is the entire scoreboard, and it is the only metric I quote for this project.

Outcome

  • Children located

    4

  • Partners

    CID Bangladesh, Bangladesh Police

  • Collaboration

    4 years, with Sadat Rahman

Status

Live, in partnership with CID Bangladesh and the Bangladesh Police.

Next

LalBus

Real-time bus tracking for University of Dhaka students. Around 10,000 people open it every day to decide when to leave the house.