Ardent Safety: hazards and missing persons

Ardent Safety is somewhere for a community to record and share a danger, so that other people nearby know about it. A flooded road. An open drain. A wall that has started to lean. A power line down across a path. Or a person who is missing.

It is amplification, not response. We help what you know reach more people nearby. That is all it does, and being clear about that is the most useful thing on this page.

Find it at /safety. The emergency numbers are at /safety/help, and that page works whether or not you have an account, whether or not the feature is switched on in your country, and whether or not you have signal, because on the mobile app those numbers are built into the app itself.

What Ardent cannot do

We have no vehicles, no radios, no duty roster, and no authority to task anybody who does. There is no button on this platform that summons help, and there is no arrangement under which a report you file here is passed to an agency on your behalf.

Reports are read by a person during business hours, Monday to Friday. Nobody is watching overnight or at the weekend. We would rather tell you that plainly, before you spend time on a form, than have you wait on a report nobody has opened.

If you need somebody to come, call 112. Filling in a form here instead will cost you time you may not have.

If someone is missing

Report it to the Ghana Police Service straight away. They are the only body that can investigate, and there is no 24-hour waiting period. That is a myth, and acting on it costs exactly the hours that matter most. Ask for the case reference number and keep it somewhere safe.

If you believe a child has been abducted, tell the police immediately and ask about AMBER Alert Ghana. The police run it with Meta, so alerts go out across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. It reaches far more people than we can, and it is the right channel.

Reporting a missing person on Ardent

You can, at /safety/missing/report, and it works differently from the hazard form on purpose.

Before the form appears you are asked to read two things and agree to both separately: that an adult has the right not to be found, and that to the best of your knowledge this person has not left to escape violence, abuse or a forced marriage. Where somebody has fled, publishing their photograph is the harm rather than the help, and there is no moderation queue that catches that afterwards because the report looks exactly like a worried family.

Nothing is published when you send it. A page can only go up once we have a police reference number, and a person on our team decides. You get a reference either way. If the police will not record a report, our team can still publish one, and in that case it carries the description but never a photograph.

A child's details need both a police reference and their parent or guardian's consent.

There is nowhere on the form to name or describe somebody you suspect, and there never will be.

If a report is about you

Every missing-person page carries a "This is me, take this page down" button. Pressing it takes the page down immediately. You do not need an account, we will not ask you to prove who you are, and you do not have to say why.

The person who filed it is told only that the case is closed. Not that you contacted us, not when, not from where, and not where you are. Any photograph is deleted from our storage rather than just hidden. If somebody wants it put back up, that takes two members of our team and a written reason, and it is not something the person who filed it can do.

Reporting a hazard

Go to /safety, read the notice, and choose Report a hazard. You do not need an account.

The form asks for a type, a short title, a description, and the district. The district is required: without it we cannot show the report to the people who need to see it, so it could never be published, and accepting it would mean telling you your warning had been received when it had not.

Your name and contact are optional and are never published. We would only use them if a reviewer needs to ask you one question about what you saw. Putting a reporter's number on a public safety notice exposes somebody already under stress to fraud, so we do not do it.

Describe the place, never a person

A report says what is dangerous and where. It must not name, photograph or describe somebody you blame, and must not be written so as to point at one.

There is no field for a suspect anywhere in Ardent Safety, and that is deliberate rather than an omission: if the form can hold an accusation, sooner or later it will carry one to a crowd. Reports that accuse a person are removed. If you believe a crime has been committed, tell the police.

How checked a report is

Every report carries a label saying how far it has been checked, and the labels never look alike.

"Community report" is not a lesser thing. It is the normal, expected state, and it is worth reading: the person who noticed a wall leaning is usually the person who lives beside it. It just is not the same as somebody official having looked, and the label says which one you are reading.

Confirming a report you have seen yourself

If you have seen the same thing, open the report and use I have seen this. It is not a vote and it does not send anybody. Several people independently confirming the same hazard is genuinely the best signal we have that it is real, which is why hazards work well here and why the count is shown.

When a report disappears

Reports come down when they are resolved, withdrawn, or out of date, and every published report has an expiry from the day it goes up.

If you open a link and it says the report is no longer current, that is usually good news rather than a broken page. A warning about a problem somebody already fixed sends people looking for something that is not there, which is its own small harm.

On your phone

Everything above works in the Ardent app: the hazard list, reporting, and each report's page.

The emergency numbers screen is different from every other screen in the app. It makes no network request at all and does not depend on the feature being switched on, because the numbers are compiled into the app itself. A phone with no signal is a fair description of somebody standing somewhere that has just become dangerous, and an emergency number that needs a working connection is one that is missing exactly when it is needed.

Where our numbers come from

Every emergency number we publish was taken from the operating agency's own website, and we will not list one we cannot confirm, even a well known one. A number that does not connect costs you time when you have none.

That is why some numbers you may remember are not on our list. If we cannot find an agency saying the number is live, it does not ship.

Who runs this

Ardent Safety is operated by the Ardent Africa Foundation, which is the data controller for reports filed through it. It is available in Ghana only at the moment. The /safety page says the same thing before you file anything, and the Foundation's own site lists it at ardentafrica.org/platform.

Nothing is published automatically, and nothing reaches anybody's phone unless a member of staff has approved it. There is no money anywhere in this feature: no donations on a report, no rewards, and no payment for information. A safety notice with a payment button attached is a fraud waiting to happen.

Building on this

Published hazard reports are available through the public API, the SDKs, an embeddable widget and the WordPress plugin, so a district assembly or a local news site can show current reports on their own pages.

Everything published that way carries the verification label and the "not an emergency service" line, and neither can be switched off. See the developer docs for why.

Last updated: 25 August 2026