Xabiso Lombo's personal safety innovation
Xabiso Lombo is the co-founder of Guardian Gabriel, a personal safety company whose primary offering is a panic button which allows the user to send an SMS with their exact location to friends and family in case of an emergency. Growing up in Queenstown in the Eastern Cape as the youngest of three sisters she would complete her schooling there before moving to Cape Town to study a degree in BCom Accounting at the University of Cape Town.
Xabiso had an entrepreneurial spirit from a young age even though she didn’t that it was called entrepreneurship at the time, she always had ideas to make money at school, such as selling nail polish remover to students at the beginning of the term or selling textbooks on behalf of other students and taking a commission. She got the idea for her project when there was an outbreak of missing persons during her second year of studies, as well as an increase in on-campus crime which made her afraid for her safety. Asking herself what she would in a dangerous situation and not having answers made her research for options, not finding viable ones and deciding that she had to develop something herself.
Photo by Mpumeleo Macu
Guardian Gabriel’s panic button works as a standalone device that doesn’t need a cellphone to work and is able to send an SMS of one’s exact location on a map to friends and family, along with one’s personal profile allowing them to navigate to you. Outside of their primary offering of the panic button, Guardian Gabriel is also looking to provide other services such as self-defence classes and post-trauma rehabilitation. The goal is to launch the panic button as a wearable, with the product currently in the pilot phase where customer validation is being gathered for the refinement of the product before it can go into product development.
Photo by Mpumeleo Macu
As a person who loves people, social entrepreneurship simply makes sense to Xabiso. She doesn’t understand the concept of a business that makes no impact as she believes the primary calling of a business is to identify a problem in a way that serves people, as they are the ones that then help you grow. Through the feedback she has received from others, Xabiso has come to realise how many people her product can help as she was simply focusing on solving a problem she perceived for herself, however, she still faces challenges such as being taken seriously as a young female in the tech industry. She is looking forward to being in an environment with fellow social entrepreneurs and learning from their journeys, applying those learnings to her own, as well as meeting new people and growing as a person.