WASHINGTON: Indiana college student Wyclife Omondi likes to be punctual. But that’s a lot more difficult when he’s back home in Nairobi.
That’s because of the Kenyan city’s bus system, which 70 per cent of residents rely on to get around. The system, with its 15,000 minibuses — or matatus, as locals call them — is informal. Fares, routes and schedules change constantly, making the system unreliable and hard to navigate.
“Basically, it’s unpredictable,” said Omondi, 22, a senior at Earlham College in Richmond, Ind. “You don’t know where the bus is, what time it will come and what time it will leave.”
That unreliability meant Omondi almost missed his appointment at the US embassy to get his student visa. For others, it can mean wasting up to two hours every day waiting for a bus, Omondi said. Many times, riders get on a bus expecting to pay one fare, only to find that the conductor has hiked up the price because he’s worried about not having enough passengers to make a profit.
“You end up spending so much of your income” on matatus, Omondi said.
Omondi has an opportunity to revolutionise how he and his fellow Nairobians get from point A to point B. He is the chief financial officer for the transportation start-up Magic Bus, which he cofounded with Earlham students Sonia Kabra, Leslie Ossete and Iman Cooper.
The team recently won the $1 million Hult Prize, a global entrepreneurship competition for students, which will help them reach that goal.
When the Hult Prize Foundation announced its 2016 challenge — to double the incomes of 10 million people living in crowded urban spaces in the world “through improved mobility and increased connectivity to people, products, services and capital by 2022” — they decided to work together to tackle the problem through transportation.
Using a simple offline text-messaging mobile app, commuters can book seats, buy tickets via mobile devices and check the fares, schedules and real-time locations of buses. Users text a code to get information about bus type, fare and estimated time of arrival. They then text another code to buy a digital ticket, which they show to the bus conductor when boarding.
For bus drivers, knowing how many passengers have bought digital tickets means that they can start driving even if the bus isn’t full.
The prevalence of mobile phones and the widespread use of mobile payments makes Kenya a perfect place to launch Magic Bus. The app is free.
“Almost everyone in Nairobi has a cell phone, and smartphone expansion is happening very rapidly,” said Jacqueline Klopp, an associate research scholar at the Center for Sustainable Urban Development at Columbia University who has worked on a project to digitally map Nairobi’s matatu routes.
“If the bulk of public transit are these minibuses, then we must find a way to leverage technology to improve these services,” Klopp said.
Klopp said a large percentage of the population in most African cities depend on public transportation.
“In many ways, this provides an opportunity to invest heavily in public transport ... We want to do this for equity reasons, for public health reasons, and we want to do this for climate and ecological reasons.”
Transportation accounts for 23 per cent of global carbon emissions, Klopp said.
“We don’t want to say to these people, ‘You cannot buy a car or ride a car.’ ... What we want to say is, ‘If you’re in a city, you should have access to high-quality options.’ “
The inspiration to create Magic Bus was the product of many conversations revolving around one question: how to have an impact. And through those discussions, the co-founders realised that while issues such as health care and education get a lot of attention, transportation often was neglected.
“Transportation is the one thing that is completely overlooked when you think about how you can change systems and make people have better access to opportunities,” said Cooper, 23, the chief marketing officer. “It’s overlooked so often, but it can facilitate so many opportunities.”
Cooper said that Magic Bus brings together three things about which she is passionate: social justice, entrepreneurship and empowering people to help them reach their full potential.
Reliable transportation, she said, “really is a way for people to have more equitable opportunities, to have better access to education, health care and jobs,”
The team beta-tested Magic Bus in Nairobi over the summer. With $10,000 that they had raised from investments and crowdfunding, they piloted their technology on 10 buses. They managed to reach 2,000 users who booked 5,000 tickets.
“It worked. It was a good idea. People loved it,” said James Kariuki, co-owner of a transport management company with a fleet of 78 buses who regularly blogs about matatus. He worked directly with the Magic Bus team to test the technology.
Kariuki is particularly excited about the digital tickets. As a former matatu driver, he is familiar with the dangers of carjacking. With matatus collecting cash fares from dawn to late at night, he explained, criminals know that the buses make easy robbery targets.
With a cashless system, however, “they know they don’t have anything to steal,” Kariuki said.
From the pilot program, the team gained a more nuanced picture of commuters’ needs and wants.
“We went in with a lot of assumptions,” said Kabra, 22, the chief product officer. They found that commuters had a lot of different preferences, with some valuing time over cost while others valuing cost over time.
On a bus route that went through the central business district, for example, the team found that passengers there were willing to pay more to reduce waiting time. But on the more suburban route with lower-income commuters, cheaper fares were a priority.
Cooper, Kabra and Ossete are getting ready to move to Nairobi to launch Magic Bus in full, and Omondi plans to join them as soon as he graduates in May. They hope to reach at least 5,000 buses in the first six months, and then expand to other cities, including Mombasa on the coast of Kenya and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. By 2020, they want to be in 11 countries.
Could Magic Bus be the next Uber?
Klopp, the research scholar, thinks there is great potential for “Uberizing the matatus.”
“They’re moving toward the idea of mobility as a kind of service that can be enhanced through ICT,” she said of Magic Bus.
“Soon, some wag will call it Uber for buses,” former president Bill Clinton said when he awarded Magic Bus the million-dollar prize last month. (The prize is a partnership between the Clinton Global Initiative and the Hult International Business School.)
The push to be like Uber can be a little intimidating. Already, Kabra said, different mentors have told them: “You need to be the Uber. You need to scale as soon as possible so you can be big. Competition is not avoidable, but you need to be big so that they can’t catch up.”
But Omondi says that at the end of the day, it all comes back to the original goal: making an impact.
“I’m doing something meaningful to my community and also ... to my life,” he said. “Transportation is something that has affected me personally, and I want to tackle it not only for myself, but for my family, for my country.”
