A school gate locked by gun violence, a community left on edge.
WTMG Labs didn't begin with a market. It began with a bakery in Yaba, a school gate shut by gun violence, and a question security technology already answers everywhere it isn't needed.
“If they can implement this, it will help with the cultism and secret cults in the school area.”— Bakery manager · Yaba, Lagos
Filmed at the gate.
Shot on the ground at Yabatech Polytechnic, Yaba, the same stretch of Lagos this whole thing started on. The armed guard at the school gate is in frame, while the businesses around it are the ones with nothing.
The place
A bakery beside Yabatech Polytechnic, through a stretch of repeated gun violence in the area. Civilians have to move with caution and stay alert here, and the school gate was locked because of the threat. After it was finally reopened, the area saw another outbreak of gun violence.
Armed forces guard the school. The civilians and small businesses around it have nothing: no monitoring, no alerts, no way to turn a camera into an answer.
The origin
The Raspberry Pi that became Gateman-AI came home from Austin, Texas in my luggage. Two years at Eagle Eye Networks, working with enterprise security camera infrastructure, showed me exactly what this technology could do, and exactly who it could never reach at enterprise prices and enterprise assumptions.
Back in Lagos, that gap was impossible to ignore. The same intelligence that watches corporate campuses could watch a bakery gate, if someone built it for the power, bandwidth, and budget that actually exist here.