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As hordes of motorcycle taxis hit the streets of traffic-clogged Kampala, it is easy to spot the drivers who are working with ride-hailing app SafeBoda: they wear orange helmets, tend to stop at traffic lights, and obey police orders.
Motorcycle taxis — called boda boda after the “border-to-border” rides between Uganda and Kenya — are the lifeblood of Uganda’s capital.
There are an estimated 150,000 of them solving infrastructure challenges that will probably exist for decades as roads are poor and there is no mass public transportation system.
But they are unsafe, informal and unregulated.
Still, they are cheap and a source of employment for young people. One of them was Ricky Rapa, until a friend of his died in 2014 in an accident in which he was not wearing a helmet.
“After losing him, I became very conscious about road safety,” says Rapa. He co-founded SafeBoda with Africa-based tech entrepreneurs Maxime Dieudonne and Alastair Sussock.
“Boda drivers lacked identity, lacked a sense of belonging, lacked a sense of responsibility, lacked trust, lacked everything,” he explains.
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These days, with 1.5m app downloads in a city of about 4m people, SafeBoda does not lack customers. Since 2017, its 22,000 drivers have completed more than 35m rides, making it the most popular ride-hailing service in Uganda.
SafeBoda, which takes 10 per cent of each driver’s average ride of USh4,000 ($1.12), is cashless, as the app holds a mobile money wallet. This avoids the annoyance of drivers and customers not having change for cash payments, while diminishing the chances of a police officer demanding a minor bribe.
And every SafeBoda driver has to go through training. At a former school building in Kampala, they learn road safety, customer service, first aid basics, motorcycle maintenance and, optionally, financial literacy.
After successfully completing the training, they are handed a smartphone, an orange reflective vest and two orange helmets — one for the driver and one for the passenger, also a rarity in Uganda — with the driver number displayed prominently.
The company declines to reveal revenues, but Sussock says it is not yet making a profit, similar to many other companies that “have a platform and have scaled”. Still, for Rapa: “The industry was a big mess. Our idea is to make the industry better with the use of technology.”
