Lantern North

A child in state or institutional care can slip through the cracks in the same week their case is filed. Registers are on paper. Hearings are missed because no one is tracking the calendar. Well-meaning donors ask to visit — and their curiosity can retraumatise a child who has already lost everything.

Lantern North is a confidential platform that lets partners trace children, track their legal cases, and let people support a specific child’s needs without ever seeing the child.

In 2025, a family in Rivers State was reunited with a son who had left home as a teenager in 2007. For eighteen years they searched police stations and institutions. He was eventually found in a correctional centre — with no record of trial, no legal representation, and a different name on the file.

This is not a rare failure. It is what happens when a child’s case file does not travel with them across facilities, courts, and years. Lantern North is built to stop that.

• Trace. Inbound searches in Pidgin, Yoruba, Igbo or English — matched against a private registry.
• Track. Each legal case at a glance, with alerts when a hearing is overdue.
• Support. Donors fund a real need (school fees, medication, a birth certificate) without ever seeing a name, face, or location.
• Missing register. Public-facing posters for children who are missing, with a verified sighting workflow.
• Confidential care. All identifying data locked behind role-based access and an immutable audit trail.

• Public views never show a child’s name, face, or location without explicit approval.
• Donors see a need, not a person. Fulfillment happens through a vetted caseworker.
• Every read and every write is logged. Access is scoped by role.
• Data is hosted in-region, with export and deletion on request from the responsible authority.

1. Pilot. One district or one shelter. A named caseworker and a named admin. 60 days.
2. Iterate. We adjust the language, roles, and workflow around how the partner actually works.
3. Scale. Widen to the next unit, or federate to peer partners under a shared registry.

The Luminary Project builds and maintains the platform. Partners retain full ownership of their data and control who sees what.

A first conversation. A named point of contact on your side, and permission to walk you through a live demo with fictional data. No commitment beyond a meeting.