How do you manage over 5,000 security guards scattered all over an African city with a very high crime rate? This is the question a Kenyan app developer, Kate Kiguru, has answered successfully through a “ghostwokers” application  or Akida featured under the InfoDev programme – a one-week intensive course designed to accelerate the growth of early-stage mobile ventures and give them a chance to pitch before angel investors.

With an estimated half a million security guards around the country’s capital Nairobi keeping residences and businesses safe, some of unscrupulous one fail to show up at their designated posts. Akida mobile app helps security firms track their employees and verify they are actually at work all the time at a very low cost.

“I plan to roll out Akida as a software service and charge a small fee for every guard that uses or is verified through the system. It could be as low as one shilling ($0.01) a day,” Kiguru said. “But then if I could get all the guards signed up in the system, which in Kenya we are talking of about 500,000 guards, then a shilling a day would make money out of it.”