The features, improvements and fixes shipping to OpenWatch. We build in the open and ship often.
Creating a watch now starts with the states you care about. Pick one, several, or all of Nigeria in one click. Each state comes with every local government area selected, and you can narrow it to the specific areas you want. No more hunting through a single list of all 774 areas.
The Alerts plan now shows every incident on the map the moment it is reported, across all 36 states and the FCT. Previously the map ran an hour behind and only the email alerts were real time. The free map keeps its one hour delay.
Each alert email now leads with what actually happened, so two different incidents of the same type no longer share a subject line and get bundled into one thread by your email app. Every alert stands on its own and is easier to scan.
The number beside each incident type and severity in the map filter now shows the true total for the selected time range, not just what has loaded on screen. The counts stay steady instead of creeping up as you scroll.
Email alerts and watches now let you choose which severity levels reach you, from low to critical, or all of them. Watch an area and get everything that happens there, or keep alerts to critical events only. It is set separately on each alert and each watch.
The 'View on dashboard' link in alert emails now opens that exact incident, not the home view, even if you have to log in first.
The area picker now covers every local government area in Nigeria, including quiet ones, with duplicate and mislabelled names cleaned up. Watches match incidents to the right area more reliably.
Breaking incidents now reach your map and alerts faster, closer to when they are first reported.
An incident's confidence now rises with every outlet that corroborates it, so a widely-reported event shows as confirmed as the sources come in and the label matches the weight of evidence.
The pipeline is now better at recognising when several reports describe the same event and folding them into one. Your feed shows a single clean incident instead of a cluster of near-duplicates.
Route assessments now weigh only the threats that actually affect a journey: kidnapping, armed robbery, banditry and unrest along the corridor. Online fraud, scams and other off-road incident types no longer dilute the score, so a route's rating reflects what you would realistically face on the road.
Related incidents no longer sit in isolation. OpenWatch now threads them into a single case file that grows as the story develops, with an AI-written narrative of what happened, a full chronological timeline, and links back to every source incident. You can follow an abduction from the first report through to the arrest or resolution, all in one place.
The dashboard now adapts cleanly to any screen size. On phones you get a dedicated bottom navigation bar and layouts that reflow to fit, so the map, feed and alerts are just as usable in the field as they are at your desk.
The research desk now streams its answer as the model writes it, rather than making you wait for the whole response. You watch the analysis take shape line by line and can start reading the moment the first sentence lands.
Set a watch on any place, an LGA, a town, or a travel corridor, and OpenWatch emails you the moment a new incident is confirmed inside it. No need to keep checking the map: the alert comes to you with the incident details and a direct link to it.
Every Sunday evening, free accounts receive a short email digest of what happened in their state over the past week: the notable incidents, the trend, and anything worth keeping an eye on. It is a simple way to stay current without opening the dashboard every day.
You can now filter the map by the group behind an incident, isolating a specific bandit network, cult or militant actor to see where it operates. A new satellite basemap toggle also swaps the map for imagery when terrain and ground detail matter.
The OpenWatch mobile app is live on both the App Store and Google Play. It brings the live map and incident feed to your pocket, and adds push notifications that alert you to high-severity incidents happening near your location.
Watches let you monitor the places that matter to you, a facility, a neighbourhood, or a route you travel, and be alerted the instant something happens there. Choose the incident types and severity you care about, and OpenWatch does the watching for you in real time.
Ask questions of the entire incident record in plain language and get back a sourced, cited answer drawn only from verified reports, never invented. Your conversations are saved, so you can pick an investigation back up exactly where you left it.
A single view that ranks every Nigerian state by risk, built from the same underlying incident data as the rest of the platform. Compare states at a glance and see which are trending up or down.
Incidents now drop at their specific reported location rather than a state or city centre, with clearer markers that keep dense areas readable. Whenever we can resolve an exact place, the pin goes there.
The full incident dataset is now queryable through a public API at api.openwatch.ng. Pull incidents straight into your own tools, dashboards or models, with a free tier to get started.
Dense regions now render as heatmaps that show where incidents concentrate, alongside live counts and time-range filters. You can move from a national overview down to a single hotspot without losing the picture.