Safiri Express

We are solving for the limited income opportunities for the working class at the bottom of the pyramid, resulting from poor connections on public transport networks, often provided by heavily polluting buses leading to a lower overall quality of life.

Our solution is a mobility platform which handles; Demand Aggregation, Supply Consistency, Service Scheduling, Promotion, Matching, Notifications, Tracking, Payments, Quality of Service, Rating and Compliance, accessible on mobile web, mobile application and USSD. We provide scheduled point to point transportation to workers from identified areas to various business and industrial districts at a subsidised fares.  

Scaled globally, we will increase incomes by providing a safe, efficient and reliable mass transportation platform assuring security of movement for human capital opening up access to multiple income opportunities, while reducing pollution from our carbon neutral operations. We will also seed increased physical access to markets and improved business competitiveness from labour circulation.

Under the Healthy Cities Challenge, we are solving two interconnected problems; access to income opportunities for 6.5 million people and cleaner, greener environments delivering the promise of sustainable cities and communities. We optimize transport efficiency to increase incomes by providing a safe, efficient, affordable and reliable mass transit platform assuring security of movement for human capital at the bottom of the pyramid. 

Rural to urban migration will see 50% of the population live in urban areas by 2050. 34% of the Kenyan population currently live in urban areas, growing at 5% per annum with 6.5 million people living in slums, a life characterized by socio-economic inequalities and exclusion, high levels of poverty and poor environmental conditions.

Low income areas are poorly served by transportation networks and it often takes multiple trips to get to places of opportunity. Each ‘hop’ on heavily polluting buses has a cost and combined, it is too high to be used daily. This directly affects their earning potential as they can only exploit limited opportunities daily. 

Our on-demand mobility service will offer point to point connections at subsidized rates in better maintained buses with an active carbon offsetting program that makes us a carbon neutral operation.

The urban poor in Nairobi spend up to 30% of their income on transport. This starves other essential needs such as food, health care, education and shelter. Commuters often have to pay large, sometimes exorbitant, shares of their incomes to informal, para-transit operators. Unaffordable mobility prevents them from breaking out of the shackles of inter-generational poverty, a situation that over 6.5 million people face.

We have engaged with potential users in Kibera and Kawangware through focus groups and by having teams on the ground collect first-hand information on routes and other observable nuances.

The ability of these urban poor to access markets, employment opportunities and service centers can be enhanced with efficient and sustainable transport systems which is the gap we are filling with Safiri Express.

By mapping out where they live and work, we aggregate demand, create virtual stops where we can pick and drop them off. We are able to assign high quality buses on the direct routes created by our platform and provide affordable scheduled transport from home to various business districts and back. This will save them up to 5 hours daily that can be applied to a second or third income generating activity. 

We provide a safe, efficient, affordable and reliable transportation service that saves on time, to the working class at the bottom of the pyramid.

Safiri Express is a high availability mobility platform accessible by commuters via Android mobile app and USSD code *789# for non-mobile data / offline access.  It works in the following way; commuters sign up and tell us where they live and work by dropping a pin or using a point of interest. They also confirm what time they need to be at respective locations.

We aggregate this demand and assign buses of just the right capacity to pick them at the virtual stops and use routes optimised by our artificial intelligence and machine learning models. 

Service payments are cashless and we provide real-time tracking of the buses and accurate estimated times of arrival and departure. This way we are able to serve commuters using bespoke routes that traditional operators can never ply or monetize. 

The cost of transit is informed by a financial algorithm that ingests fifteen data points to give peak and off peak cost per route that will never change giving price protection and the ability to plan and budget for their daily transit needs to and from the places where they earn their livelihood. Every ticket carries with it micro insurance cover for the duration of the trip.

Technology wise we leverage first and second hand big data to determine how the city moves. From cell tower data in partnership with a local telco, mobility data from Uber Movement to the larger Google Maps feature sets that unlock immersive location experiences across maps (data on location names, addresses), routes (up to date data on distances between points, suggested routes, and estimated travel times. With the ability to create efficient routes for up to 25 waypoints), and places (context they need with static or interactive maps).

Microservices architecture underpins our systems and at a high level we have built a powerful reactive, concurrent, and distributed backend. 

We are rethinking the entire mobility value chain as expressive and supportive of inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable cities. Most other interventions are skewed toward profit maximization for a subset of players with little regard for the commuter or the environment.

Using machine learning and artificial intelligence, we use first and second hand data sources to map out the mobility patterns of entire cities, broken down into commuter cohorts across business districts, neighbourhoods and smaller clusters, using desired time, purpose and frequency of each trip to deploy buses just in time on predetermined fixed or bespoke routes to; for example health centers, schools or market centers. We optimize pick-up, drop-off and routing in ways that reduce idling time and pollution contribution per bus, diligent servicing of the buses also happening.

Fair fare pricing is determined by 15 metrics and where needed we are able to subsidized this for underprivileged community cohorts while providing the same high quality service. Our direct carbon offset model is a first in Africa, and as the market matures we will switch to green energy reaching carbon neutral and finally carbon negative operations.

Unlike traditional operators who offer erratic daily wages, we are an equal opportunity employer with bus captains and cabin crew having a good salary + health benefits. Medium term, in Nairobi, Kenya, we hope to employ 1,200 crew while serving 200,000 persons daily.  

Service is accessible via android mobile app and USSD ensuring 100% coverage.

For a simple, straightforward, high availability user experience on Safiri Express across web, USSD and mobile application, we have engineered a complex backend to handle complex multidimensional interactions, and potentially massive amounts of traffic. Following best practise we have numerous microservices that can independently scale both horizontally and vertically.

Core to our value proposition is our machine learning and artificial intelligence infrastructure where we use OR-Tools, an open source software suite for optimization, tuned for tackling the world's toughest problems in vehicle routing, flows and constraint programming and we leverage Tensor Flow + Kubeflow tools and libraries to build, train and deploy models in our private cloud.  Our ability to form commuter clusters, predict demand and better estimated times of pickup and drop off, bus dispatch etc is important. Part of our differentiated value is we ingest anonymized cell tower ping data to better analyse a city’s actual heartbeat.  

We use Scala as our primary development language along with toolkits like Akka that allow for the building of powerful reactive, concurrent, and distributed applications more easily. Our hybrid cloud runs Kubernetes.

We use Google Maps Platform across its three key service offerings of Maps, Routes and Places.

For payments we have gone cashless and integrated mobile money platform Mpesa that affords us a seamless digital payment experience. 

Mobility is a utility that connects the day to day dots of the life of every city resident, the businesses that serve them and the communities they form. A reliable, affordable and convenient mobility service has the following direct benefits that deliver on the promise of Healthy Cities.

Improved Access

• The search for better work opportunities is the biggest driver or rural-urban migration. Safiri Express will at scale empower millions of residents to connect to multiple daily opportunities for income generation;
• Better income expands housing and nutrition options available leading to the consumption of a more balanced diet, with direct health benefits which means better resistance to illness and less visits to the healthcare facilities. Where necessary it will be possible to get to any facility;
• Where people can reach, they consume goods and services. We will therefore grow the total addressable market for commodities with a last mile linkage given by the expanded transit network. This will bring about improved business competitiveness leading to a reduction in the costs of production for producers and manufactures who can then invest towards improving product quality, value addition and differentiation. 

Cleaner environment: greener spaces, cleaner air

• With higher disposable income residents will displace charcoal, wood and kerosene in food preparation and take up LPG or electricity. 
• We reduce the overall pollution contribution per bus by smarter routing and less idling. 
• Our active carbon offset tree planting program will see us run a carbon neutral network and at scale go carbon negative.

In partnership with Isuzu East Africa – formerly General Motors East Africa, we conducted a service dipstick test in Nairobi from December 2017 to March 2018. We drove through neighbourhoods, business districts, industrial areas and train terminus, fully branded and carrying our unique selling proposition and a call to action to dial our dedicated USSD code *789#. Over the period we engaged with 35,000 potential commuters from our target areas, unlocking the following data. Age- between 20 and 35 years old, 53% were women, 78% took solo trips, 82% had a smartphone, 73% preferred mobile money for payment, and from the middle class segment - 60% are happy to pay $ 0.5 to $1 more. The last statistic is key in our model where we are looking to subsidize fares in underserved communities where normal operations would otherwise be unprofitable.

We are now working towards our price sensitivity pilot in July 2019, targeting to sign up at least 750,000 potential commuters. This will give a good balance on daily demand and supply. For our pricing pilot we will operate two buses that will carry 500 commuters daily for a total of 1,000 persons.

Within one year of go live we project that we will have 65 buses on our platform with a daily carriage capacity of 32,500 and by year 5 we will hit our midterm target of 300 buses, moving at least 150,000 people daily. Long-term we are looking to scale to 2,000 buses to connect 1,000,000 people daily.    

Cities in Africa share many of the same characteristics with millions of residents, daily visitors and businesses affected negatively by lack of reliable and affordable mobility/logistics options. Using Nairobi as our first market to test, iterate, refine, launch and scale, we hope to ignite the adoption of a new way of mobility using data and tech to orchestrate millions of meaningful daily trips. We chose Nairobi because we have first-hand experience on the market and it nuances plus a good percentage of its population is digitally savvy.

Our mission is to sustainably connect at least 1 million people daily to their place of opportunity in each of the cities that we will operate in. The direct effect of this, running of our model will deliver the promise of healthy, sustainable and resilient cities.

We can only realise our desired impact if we hit scale. To do this we need a good capital base and we are looking to list at the Growth Enterprise Market Segment at the Nairobi Stock Exchange within 36 months of going live into the market. This will do two key things;

1 - Provide capital for;

• Pan African expansion,
• Facilitation of green vehicles for our franchisees,
• Market activation and penetration.

2 - Take ownership of the technology and its benefits back to the local people by allowing them to own a stake in the company, closing the benefit loop beautifully.    

Our two biggest barriers have been access to capital and talent.

On Capital

In Africa, access to meaningful start-up capital is limited. Many programs, accelerators, and angel investors are only able to meet small ticket sizes, which may offer a decent runway for a pure software technology operation but fall short for mobility innovations such as Safiri Express where there is more to do, up and above providing a technology platform. Since 2010 a total of $ 68.6 billion has gone towards e-hailing and telematics / intelligent traffic startups globally (McKinsey April 2019 - https://buff.ly/2V8WqZ5) but only a trickle has been invested directly into companies based out of and operating on the continent. Capital constraints stunt growth and scale plans slowing down time to impact.

On talent

There are not many developers who are deeply competent in the technology stack(s) that are key to our success. Where available the talent comes at a premium due to global demand. Access to capital can mitigate this. 

On Capital we are taking a differentiated approach to the traditional venture capital and private equity route. First, we are actively seeking out grant funding to enable us prove our hypothesis and test out models; Second, we are leveraging the franchise framework on the supply side (bus fleet acquisition and growth) where we give the investment opportunity to the open market and connect them to financial institutions who can provide various facilities towards the purchase of buses that fit our rigorous standards and Third, listing at the Nairobi bourse (http://bit.ly/2FHT32d) and innovating around fractional ownership under the Capital Markets Authority Regulatory Sandbox (http://bit.ly/2Yqykr6) will provide longer term capital for our bold vision.

On talent, we ceded some shareholding to AT Labs who have provided access to talent to get us through to market go live after which work contracts will be transferred to us. This ensures that we are in a cash positive position post go to market and can afford to have a deeply competent team on payroll. We will also open an advanced internship program to attract bright minds from across the globe who want to apply themselves toward transformational innovation working with us.

Not applicable 

The Safiri Express team is currently 14 strong with 4 full-time members in the CEO,CTO, CFO and Business Development functions and 10 part time staff seconded to us from AT Labs. A number of the part-time staff will transition into permanent roles following the price sensitivity pilot and firming up of the go to market strategy for the first quarter of 2020. We project that we will grow to a team of 40 over the next 36 months not including our bus captain, cabin crew and service teams. Our board of advisors current stands at two.

At Safiri Express, technology meets hospitality meets business meets social impact! We are a melting pot of engineers, user experience designers, software engineers, customer service executives, math heads, storytellers and business executives all looking to connect people to their daily opportunities through environmentally friendly, sustainable and seamless mobility.

We understand the problems intimately, have interacted with and experienced them directly and have been actively working with possible ultimate beneficiaries, focus groups and other stakeholders to create a solution that we believe can scale to multiples regions across the world.

Dr. Kenneth Kaduki; Chairman and Co-founder overseeing governance has 25 years teaching and research experience at the University of Nairobi, Department of Physics; Mrs. Zulekha Ali, CEO and Co-founder is an actuary by training with over 5 years experience  in marketing and sales functions at leading experiential and market activation companies and 5 star hospitality establishments; Samuel Gikandi; CTO, shareholder and MIT Alumni ‘06, is a seasoned engineer having also co-founded API first communications company – AfricasTalking that raised $8.6 million in 2018 from IFC Venture Capital, with participation from Orange Digital Ventures and Social Capital ; Mbugua Njihia; Co-founder and Head of Business and Partnerships has over 14 years in technology and business leadership roles in mobile value added services and payments.

We also have locally domiciled IP on a custom telematics device that we will leverage in future service permutations. Kenya Industrial Properties Institute (KIPI) Registration no: 120 (45) | Application no.: KE/16/00678

Total Kenya’s core business is the marketing and distribution of petroleum products and related services to industrial, transport, commercial and domestic users. Total have given us a rebate on pump prices that will see our overall cost of service reduce greatly as we grow our fleet. They have offered vehicle service consumables at discounted rates and have a strong tree planting environmental program - Total Eco Challenge, under which our carbon offset agenda will benefit. The TOTAL Eco Challenge program was started in 2003 to inspire and help all Kenyans plant trees in every possible place. Today, the program has more than 1,600 projects that have seen the planting of millions of trees since its inception. 

Isuzu Motors East Africa, formerly General Motors East Africa, is the market leader in manufacturing and distribution of commercial vehicles with a range covering buses, trucks and pick-ups. Isuzu provided two brand new buses for our first pilot that saw us engage over 35,000 city residents. Together we are exploring how to decarbonise commuter transit and also provide safer mobility for school going children from underprivileged communities, promoting physical safety by decreasing incidents of violence or accidents.

The Safiri Express business model is easy to understand. We have two primary publics, the service provider whom we give revenue guarantees and the commuter. We use 15 data points to determine the cost of fulfilling trip on a given route; weighted vehicle consumption per kilometre, buffered cost of fuel, time of day, day of the week, vehicle idling time, route elevation, predetermined fixed monthly cost, estimated variable monthly cost, lease facility overhead or loan repayment overhead, trip insurance allocation, collective idle time compensation, carbon offset margin, government tax, platform margin and service provider margin. We make a percentage of the gross fare collected.

Our differentiator and also what helps us reduce the total cost of service, is that we have additional alternative sources of revenue, for example, the sale of mobile phone airtime and data that earn us 8% commissions and a yet to be activated advertising model that will see us employ a cost per view model once we hit scale. The urban poor also consume lots of FMCG products daily as they purchase in small quantities and we are looking at providing a digital store where they can order for their daily needs with fulfilment done by us. The economies of scale will unlock this fourth revenue channel for us. Lastly our model also accommodates government or grant subsidies, where based on trip data that we generate, a donor or government can meet the service budget deficit on routes where other interventions still yield a negative income result.   

Achieving scale is the only way for us to ensure financial sustainability and adequately serve the vulnerable groups we are targeting and also realise the benefits of our carbon neutral network. 

This far we have bootstrapped to build out the technology and run our first pilot and as we approach a go to market timeline of the first quarter of 2020, we are now actively engaging both patient social and venture capital to support our growth strategy. 

Our platform will also be deployed to offer multimodal transit to the larger city of Nairobi and it metro areas where there is a discerning middle class that is willing to pay an additional premium of between $0.6 and $1 for our service promise. 

We are therefore looking at a service subsidization model where part of our revenue goes directly into subsidizing costs for the segment of our commuters that are disenfranchised. 

Combined with the other three potential revenue streams we will run a net-profitable operation that adds true value to all its value chain partners and customers.

We are applying to Solve for assistance in three key areas where we most need support; 

• Access to Funding: on the African continent, the funding ecosystem is yet to come full circle to meet the missing middle needs for technology based innovations that have the potential to scale and transform entire market segments. We are looking for patient grant capital that will allow us to power through our second pilot and have us firmly on our way to market launch;
• Access to people: we are a technology company first, then a mobility company second. There are many areas where we still have gaps within the team and we look forward to meeting and getting exposed to great minds who may serve as advisors, mentors, investors or even join the team!
• Unlocking Partnerships: on the African continent, key partnerships with multinationals are often brokered outside the continent often based on readily available networks. We believe that being part of Solve will break down these walls and enable us to connect to potential partners via their relevant global offices that drive intervention decisions.   

Not applicable

The Shell Foundation

• From the Shell Foundation we are looking at both network and capital support for the service launch and to broker conversations with local petroleum operators that they are affiliated to via a different company on greener fuels.  

Bus Manufacturers 

• We are keen to discuss and lock down agreements with bus manufactures that will enable us to design and deploy green energy units built for the road and infrastructure conditions that we grapple with.   

The World Bank

• The World Bank has the capital for infrastructure projects that are done under public-private initiatives. Part of our efficiency strategy includes setting up satellite yards to house and manage inventory and staff that are not live on the network at any point in time. This fits in well with some of the interventions they are working on with local governments.

At the core of intelligent transport and mobility is the ability to derive value from available data that comes in at high volume and velocity tapered by a multitude of constraints. The efficiency of Safiri Express as a platform is heavily reliant and hinged on our ability to forecast demand, determine optimal routing across thousands of permutations, predict incidences and mitigate appropriately, track our environmental footprint, preventive maintenance of fleets, transit schedule suggestions for commuters and a host of other applications that would make seamless movement a reality.

While we have used OR-Tools (open source software for combinatorial optimization, which seeks to find the best solution to a problem out of a very large set of possible solutions) and integrated some standard libraries such as the traveling salesman problem and vehicle routing problem, this is not sufficient for the long-term. We are currently in talks with a mobile telecommunications company to share anonymized cell-tower ping data. This along with other key partnerships that we are pursuing will open data at an unprecedented scale and enable us to truly orchestrate entire cities and bring harmony to day to day mobility.

With the AI Innovations Prize we will do two things; first will be to recruit more talent to get us up from one part-time data science associate to our ideal number of 3 full time data wranglers and second will be to intensify building and training our custom machine learning models on Tensor Flow for deployment on production.        

The exponential growth of motorbikes and second-hand imported vehicles in the last 20 years and the poor maintenance of thousands of public service vehicles in Nairobi and many African cities has caused a health crisis. Respiratory diseases are on the increase in Kenya, directly linked to air pollution from the burning of petroleum hydrocarbons from transport operations. Studies have confirmed the link of pollution to cardiovascular, and lung cancer mortality plus detrimental effects on psychological and mental health. The 2017 Kenya Economic Survey reveals that in 2016, 19.9 million cases of respiratory diseases were reported in health facilities, a 63 per cent increase from the 12.2 million cases in 2012.

Our aim at Safiri Express is to run a carbon negative operation and we will apply the Innovating Together for Healthy Cities Grant towards this.

• By optimizing public transport, we will hopefully reduce the physical number of cars on the road as the working middle class will also be drawn in by our time-saving, cost and convenience value proposition. 
• Second, we handle maintenance of all buses on our platform through service contracts ensuring optimal operational efficiency which pollutes less. 
• Third, is that with every fare collected, a percentage is put aside for carbon offset. We will actively plant micro forests of indigenous trees at the rate of 1 tree per month per commuter who uses our services for the month. In 10 years, we are looking at electronic or biofuel buses for a full circle intervention.   

Crime related gun violence has been on the increase in Nairobi. Caught on security cameras or post dramatic showdowns with law enforcement, the sad reality dawns that the majority of the perpetrators are disenfranchised youth. 

Able-bodied and full of life, they feel that they have been left out by society having been served a losing card. They resort to making it by hook or crook, with many gang posts dotting Facebook where they can be seen hanging out often with drugs and alcohol in the picture. 

The estimated total number of guns both licit and illicit held by civilians in Kenya in 2017 is 750,000. Coupled with porous borders to the north it is easy to rent or purchase a firearm.

Inequity is the root cause of gun-related violence, strung together by other conditions such as joblessness, homelessness, poor education, and health.

Safiri Express will create an immediate lift in legitimate income generating potential by connecting these youths to jobs, where in lieu of papers et cetera they can still engage in honest work and also from jobs within the transport network itself for which many opportunities for training exist from corporate Kenya CSR. 

The safety of neighborhoods is improved by de-risking early morning and late night commutes to and from work in affected neighborhoods. Registered incomes open access to financial services that can provide ‘escape velocity’ from poverty and improve neighbourhoods overall.  

We will use these funds to pilot interventions in two high-risk neighborhoods of Kibera and Kawangware. 

In many cities, the safety, security, and dignity of women and girls is never guaranteed in the public transportation system. When using public transport, women and girls not only have to worry about reaching their destination but also about the possibility of verbal abuse and sexual harassment. Public transport needs to be safe, accessible, and responsive to the distinct needs of women, whose commute patterns vary greatly from those of men across purpose, frequency and distance because of their social roles and mix of economic activities. 

Equitable access to public transport is about building a transport system/platform/ network that works work for women, meeting their need for safe, efficient, sustainable mobility. Transport outside established commuter corridors is often unavailable during off-peak hours when women are most likely to need public transport to access their social and economic opportunities. 

A dependable mobility platform has the potential to make employment, healthcare, and education accessible to women. Poor planning and simple oversight put these out of reach and limit their financial autonomy. 

At Safiri Express, we will apply the Innovation for Women Prize grant, directly towards testing, adapting and scaling mobility interventions for women and girls across the spectrum allowing them to reach and exploit their daily opportunities and obligations with peace of mind. 

We subscribe to the precepts of the American AI Initiative, the Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI by the High-Level Expert Group on AI at the EU and the Open AI Charter.

At the core of intelligent transport and mobility is the ability to derive value from available data that comes in at high volume and velocity tapered by a multitude of constraints. The efficiency of Safiri Express as a platform is heavily reliant and hinged on our ability to forecast demand, determine optimal routing across thousands of permutations, predict incidences and mitigate appropriately, track our environmental footprint, preventive maintenance of fleets, transit schedule suggestions for commuters and a host of other applications that would make seamless mobility a reality.

While we have used OR-Tools and integrated some standard libraries such as the traveling salesman problem and vehicle routing problem, this is not sufficient for the long-term. We are currently in talks with a mobile telecommunications company to share anonymized cell-tower ping data. This along with other key partnerships e.g. Uber Movement that we are pursuing will open data at an unprecedented scale enabling us to truly orchestrate entire cities and bring harmony to day to day mobility.

With the Innospark Ventures Prize we will focus on building and training our custom machine learning models on Tensor Flow based on anonymized cell tower data and thereafter leverage the GSMA Ecosystem Accelerator Innovation Fund to connect us with US telcos for pilot projects to transform public transport in major US Cities.  

Not applicable to Safiri Express at this stage.