SafeRoute Legal
A multilingual offline-first mobile app that walks asylum seekers arriving in the UK and France through their legal rights, asylum application steps, and nearest legal aid clinics, without needing a phone plan.
Asylum seekers and refugees who have just arrived in the UK or northern France
- Offline legal-rights guides in Arabic, Pashto, Tigrinya, French, and English
- Step-by-step asylum application walkthrough with country-specific forms
- Maps of free legal aid clinics, NGO drop-ins, and safe accommodation
- One-tap emergency contact that shares location with a trusted family member
Continued Channel crossing deaths and a busy summer for small-boat crossings highlight the urgent need for accurate, language-accessible legal information at the point of arrival.
Roughly 37,000–41,000 small-boat Channel crossings in 2024–2025 and ~101,000 total UK asylum claims in 2025, indicating a large, sustained point-of-arrival population needing legal information.People crossing the English Channel in small boats ↗
No clear dominant offline-first multilingual mobile app for UK/France arrivals; existing provision is GOV.UK PDFs, UNHCR web help pages, NGO websites and local legal clinics — web-first rather than offline-mobile-first.Information booklet about your asylum application - GOV.UK ↗Help - UNHCR ↗
Target users are pre-phone-plan and resource-constrained; any revenue must come from Home Office/Ministry of Justice grants, NGO funding, or philanthropy, not end users — direct monetization is essentially zero.Asylum and immigration - briefing note - Home Office in the media ↗
Asylum flows into the UK/France are structural and multi-decade; UK recorded over 200,000 small-boat arrivals since 2018, and legal-aid demand persists across changing policy regimes (e.g., Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill).Channel Crossing Tracker - Migration Watch UK ↗People crossing the English Channel in small boats ↗
Offline-first mobile architecture and CMS-backed multilingual content are well-trodden engineering problems, but the app requires translation across many arrival languages plus continuous legal-accuracy updates as UK/French asylum rules change.Information booklet about your asylum application - GOV.UK ↗