ISLAMABAD: The Ministry of Human Rights has launched a community engagement campaign to raise awareness about the “Zainab Alert” App for missing children.
The first session was conducted in the Pilot Comprehensive Community Development Centre in Sohan area of the federal capital. The campaign is geared towards encouraging parents, teachers, and other community members to report missing children using the newly instituted mechanism.
Several sessions in various community centres in Islamabad will be conducted in the next few weeks. The campaign involves interactive community sessions to explain the technical aspects of the application in order to empower and enable citizens to effectively use the application to report, track and trace missing children in their communities.
Participants are given demo tutorials on how to use the app. Citizen’s lacking internet access or basic literacy can visit any government office or institution and request that an alert be generated on their behalf.
Moreover, the state machinery and system to respond to Zainab Alerts is also explained to participants. The police will be obligated to contact the person who has generated the Zainab Alert within a period of 24 hours and lodge an FIR based on the information provided.
The alert will be sent to the District Police Officers (DPOs) and the Regional Police Officers (RPOs) through their respective dashboards as well as through SMS notifications due to the urgent nature of response required.
The Inspector Generals will be responsible for following up in their provincial capacities as well as the chief ministers and home secretaries. Citizens are further informed about the option of tracking and tracing the progress of their complaint through the application.
They are also encouraged to regularly visit the public registrar of missing children on the app or web portal to help track and trace missing children, as well as to increase visibility through sharing and promoting such cases on social media.
The Zainab Alert system activates the state machinery at regional and district levels for effective emergency response and recovery of missing children. The alert mechanism is already available to three million registered users on the portal.
