This week, I caught up with one of the teams taking part in Carma Axlr8r, SafeMotos. They’re building a motorcycle taxi-hailing app in Rwanda. Below, co-founder, Barrett Nash, talks a bit about what motivates them to work on changing transportation in Rwanda.
“Every twelve days, more than nine thousand people die across Africa from road deaths, eclipsing the entire two year Ebola crisis.
Motorcycle taxis are a key cause of road deaths. Cheap and able to weave through traffic, there are now more motorcycles produced globally than cars. However, they are also very dangerous.
Our company SafeMotos is making motorcycle taxis safer across Africa, starting in Rwanda where SafeMotos is based from and motorcycle taxis account for 80% of traffic accidents.
SafeMotos is disrupting a motorcycle taxi business which only rewards drivers for completing as many trips as they can, as fast as they can. We are gathering accelerometer, GPS and gyroscope data from drivers equipped with smartphones, then using this information to make a model of drivers’ habits. We know if they accelerate or decelerate too quickly, we know if they are going suicidal speeds during rush hour, we know if the driver has been on the road for twelve hours straight. We are able to say whether a driver is safer or more dangerous than average.
From SafeMotos research, more than 75% of Rwandans would pay more for a safer driver. SafeMotos, addresses this demand by using a Hailo-style smartphone app which empowers customers to choose a safer driver and creates the financial incentive for drivers to drive safer.”
Founded by a Canadian entrepreneur with 8 years experience in Africa and a Kenyan software engineer who became fluent in C++ when he was 14, SafeMotos believes that the complacency which perceives road deaths as a matter of fate is wrong: they are an avoidable tragedy just like war or disease, and SafeMotos is a part of the solution for avoiding some of the 268,000 Africans who die every year from road deaths.