Dear Henrietta: Nigeria’s Homegrown All-in-One Safety Net for Women A New Kind of Guardian in Your Pocket

By Ferdinand Ekechukwu

It’s 9 p.m. in Abuja, and a young woman is walking to her car, keys between her fingers just in case. For many Nigerian women, a simple commute or night out comes with a twinge of anxiety. It’s not paranoia; it’s reality. Globally, roughly one in three women have experienced intimate partner violence or sexual violence in their lifetime. In Nigeria, a government survey found that about one in three women had already faced physical violence by the age of 15. These statistics loom like a shadow over everyday life, turning routine moments such as a taxi ride, a walk home, or a first date into calculated risks. The question on everyone’s mind is simple: Who will be there if something goes wrong?

Enter Dear Henrietta, a new Nigerian-built app designed to be that ever-present guardian angel and much more. Slated to launch in July 2025, Dear Henrietta blends personal safety tools with mental health support and self-care resources, all within one seamless platform. Think of it as part panic button, part anonymous therapist, part private diary, and part wellness shop. It’s a bold, all-in-one approach born from a simple, powerful idea: staying safe and staying sane are deeply connected for women, and one app should help with both. “We didn’t want to build just another SOS app or another wellness app. It had to be both,” says the app’s founder. “In real life, you don’t separate your fear from your healing. They are part of the same journey.”

Already, anticipation is high. Without a single official ad, Dear Henrietta has over 2,000 women across Nigeria signed up on its waitlist. The appeal is clear: a tool that checks if you got home safely at night and checks in on how you’re feeling about what happened during the day. The team even refers to the platform as “a soft place to land, in a world that expects her to be hard,” a striking tagline circulating on social media. In other words, Dear Henrietta wants to be a cushion and a confidant for every woman who has had to figure it out alone. It’s a powerful promise that blends tech innovation with emotional intelligence and carries the weight of many women’s hopes as launch day nears.

But this isn’t just another app entering the market. Dear Henrietta is the first platform of its kind in the world to combine real-world safety tools, trauma-informed therapy access, digital journaling, and a curated wellness marketplace, all intentionally built by and for women. In a sea of tech designed to track, measure, or alert, this is one of the first to also hold space for emotion and recovery. If that sounds revolutionary, it’s because it is.

One App, Many Lifelines
At its core, Dear Henrietta offers a kind of digital safety net woven from multiple threads. Open the app, and you’re greeted with a calm, intuitive interface instead of a clutter of menus. Front and center is the panic button, discreet but ready. This is the feature you hope never to need, but if you do, one tap triggers an SOS. In an emergency, the panic button instantly alerts your trusted contacts (friends, family, or anyone you’ve chosen) with your real-time location and a preset distress message. “In Nigeria, we often rely on friends or family, not the police, as our first responders,” one team member explains. That reality was highlighted during Nigeria’s #EndSARS protests, when apps like Sety and Aabo helped people reach out for help. Dear Henrietta builds on this culture of community care, digitising the “please check on me” call that so many women make before a risky journey. If danger arises, the app ensures you are not alone in that moment.

Personal safety is not only about crisis response. It is also about prevention and peace of mind. One of Dear Henrietta’s most thoughtful features is its check-in system. For example, if you are heading out for a first date or a long trip, you can set a check-in timer for two hours. If time runs out and you haven’t tapped “I’m okay,” the app will automatically alert your emergency contacts. On the other hand, if you arrive safely or if everything is going well, a quick tap reassures the app and your network that all is fine. It’s like having a friend who always remembers to check in, even when life gets busy. “We basically digitised the buddy system Nigerian women already use,” another team member says. “The difference is that now it is automated.” A tool like this replaces anxious clock-watching with quiet reassurance. The app keeps track, so you can focus on living.

Beyond these immediate safety tools, Dear Henrietta also addresses mental and emotional well-being—a space often overlooked in safety tech. Inside the app, users will find a mental health portal with access to licensed therapists for anonymous sessions. Whether via chat or call, and always under a pseudonym, women can seek help for trauma, anxiety, or everyday stress. This is not a side feature. It is a foundational part of the experience. “Surviving a bad experience is one thing. Coping afterward is another,” says a team member who worked on the therapy feature. Physical danger may pass, but mental scars often remain. “Safety isn’t just about escaping harm. It is also about being able to process and recover. We wanted a tool that stays with you through both.” In Nigeria, where therapy is still stigmatized and anonymity can encourage honesty, this feature could be transformative. No names, no judgment—just support.

Alongside therapy, the app includes private journaling, a secure digital diary built into Dear Henrietta. Users can write about anything, whether it’s a microaggression at work, a frightening experience, or a moment of personal strength. Journaling is known to be cathartic, and embedding this function directly in the app gives women a safe place to reflect at any hour. The journal is locked behind app security, meaning your entries remain entirely private. Sometimes just writing, “Today, I felt scared, but I got through it,” and knowing it is protected can be a form of healing in itself. This turns Dear Henrietta into not just a crisis tool, but an everyday emotional anchor.

Another notable feature is the curated wellness marketplace. Within the app, users can browse a range of products and services selected for safety and self-care. These include drink spike test kits, discreet personal alarms, herbal teas for stress relief, books on mental health, and discounted sessions for yoga or self-defense classes. This marketplace makes Dear Henrietta feel more like a holistic hub. After meeting urgent needs, the app quietly encourages longer-term wellness habits.

What ties all of these features together is a commitment to simplicity. There is a lot packed into the app, but it doesn’t feel overwhelming. “One of our hardest design tasks was making it all feel like one experience,” admits the lead designer. “A user might come for the panic button and later discover the journal, or start with therapy and eventually use the check-ins. Each part had to feel like it naturally belongs like different rooms in one house.” This cohesion extends to the app’s name. It is not called “SafeWoman” or “GuardApp.” It’s named like a person, Henrietta, because it is meant to feel human. “We wanted it to sound like someone you trust. Henrietta felt like that reliable older sister or protective mother figure,” says the designer.

Built in Nigeria, Designed for Every Woman

Dear Henrietta may have global ambitions, but its soul is deeply Nigerian. The founding team, made up of young Nigerian women with backgrounds in public health, healthcare, technology, psychology, and advocacy, built this from their own lived realities. In Nigeria, where emergency response systems can be unreliable, the first person you call is often a friend. “Here, we depend on each other,” says one team member. “We’ve all sent that ‘call me when you get home’ text. We’ve all waited anxiously when a friend was late and not answering. We created Dear Henrietta to be an extra layer in those moments, something to help when human presence isn’t enough.”

The team also rejected the idea of a one-size-fits-all app. Nigeria is vast and diverse, and what applies in Lagos may not hold in Kaduna or Enugu. From the beginning, they tested early versions with women across different regions—Lagos, Abuja, Zaria, and small towns in Delta and Enugu. Feedback from these groups shaped everything from the language (simple English without slang) to the tech functionality (designed to work on older smartphones and weak internet). “Whether you’re a student in Yaba or a farmer’s daughter in Kogi, if you have a smartphone, you should be able to use Henrietta,” says the product lead. The issues the app tackles- safety, trauma, healing, are not limited by geography or class.

The therapy feature was designed with cultural sensitivity in mind. In Nigeria, mental health is still a difficult conversation. Therapy is seen as something for the wealthy, or misunderstood entirely. The anonymity within Dear Henrietta is what makes it radical. “Many women here carry trauma silently because they fear being judged,” explains a licensed therapist from the app. “They may talk to a pastor, an imam, or a friend, but professional help is often out of reach.” By removing the need for real names and offering in-app counseling, Dear Henrietta makes therapy feel possible. One early user in Kaduna said, “It felt like talking to a wise auntie who would never judge me.” That trust is what the team set out to build.

As the launch date approaches, the team is both excited and anxious. They’ve begun onboarding the first batch of users from the waitlist, gathering feedback and fine-tuning the platform. The plan is to start in Nigeria, gather as many lessons as possible, and then expand to other African countries where similar needs exist. “Today it is Lagos and Abuja. Tomorrow—Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, who knows?” muses one team member, eyes on the horizon. They’ve intentionally built the app to be scalable and adaptable so new features like multi-language support or region-specific resources can be added as they grow.

In their Lagos office, the team will likely spend the night before launch fine-tuning final details and holding collective hope for stability. Come July 2025, a new icon will appear in app stores. For thousands of waiting women, it represents a promise of security and solidarity. For the team, it represents years of hard work and their shared vision. And for African tech, Dear Henrietta stands as proof of what is possible when solutions are built by those who deeply understand the problems. As the app goes live, it may mark more than just a product launch. It could be the start of a movement where empathy, local insight, and technology unite.

“This is just the beginning,” says one quietly passionate team member. “We built Dear Henrietta for Nigeria because home is where hurt and hope are strongest. But our vision does not end here. We are showing that solutions built by us, for us, can change the game.” And with that, a new chapter in Nigerian tech, and in the lives of countless women, is set to unfold. The message is clear: Dear Henrietta is more than an app launch. It is a heartfelt letter to African women, written in code and compassion, signed with a simple sentiment—“for healing, for safety, for us.”