The University of Johannesburg’s Emergency Medical Care Faculty trains world-class paramedics. But despite their expert training, there’s one problem that repeatedly gets in the way of their work.

In South Africa’s dense, growing metropolitan areas, most people don’t have visible house numbers.

This means emergency services like ambulances can’t locate the houses they’re called to – and they arrive too late, often with tragic consequences. While house numbers are a rarity, virtually every house has a satellite dish.

Satellite dishes are the perfect medium for displaying house numbers: they have a large flat surface area to accommodate the numbers and they’re elevated above street level so can be easily seen from the road.

The Kliptown project demonstrated proof of concept and was the “beta” phase of the idea. The public and the media received the idea with great enthusiasm, as did the community residents. Such was our success that we have attracted 2 major corporate sponsors. For our next phase we are going to roll out numbered satellite dishes on a much larger scale, starting with 50 000 dishes across five different communities in South Africa.

For this we needed a much more scaleable solution. We’ve devised a system whereby satellite dish installers will be supplied with a kit consisting of 5 sets of reusable magnetic numbers and matt spray paint. All the installer will have to do is stick the numbers on to the surface of the dish, apply a coat of spray paint to the surface of the dish and remove the magnetic numbers. Application will be quick and easy, at a cost to the corporate sponsor of around 1 Euro per dish. (The consumer will receive it for free).

Satellife has the potential to save many thousands of lives, as well as facilitating many essential services like postal delivery. Currently most postal communication to these communities never reaches its intended destination. It will be easier for local municipalities, electricity providers and water boards to supply vital services and to access properties in the event of an interruption in the water or electricity supply to a household.

Crucially, we have identified a major opportunity for enterprise development, which the South African government has identified as a key pillar of socioeconomic transformation and has mandated South African business to invest in – or risk major penalties.

There are 6 million existing ones across South Africa - opportunity to create hundreds of small businesses in local communities by identifying and training local entrepreneurs to apply the numbers, to the dishes.