Globally, nearly a quarter of energy-related carbon emissions are created by the transport sector alone, which is heavily reliant on fossil fuels. To achieve the Paris Agreement climate goals, decarbonising the sector is a global imperative. Africa, in that sense, sits at a crossroads with a combination of two opposing mobility trends: very low levels of motorisation as compared to the rest of the world plus one of the fastest vehicle growth rates. Compared to Europe’s 4% annual vehicle sales, most African countries’ sales are rapidly increasing at over 10% annually.¹ Driven by rapid population growth, urbanisation and economic growth, Sub-Saharan Africa is going through a mobility revolution. However, infrastructure challenges, such as bad roads and poor connectivity to rural areas, punctuate the development landscape. Africa is also slowly but surely turning a new page, transitioning to low-emission mobility technologies. In Africa, especially in the East, the e-mobility landscape is changing rapidly, with new technologies and e-mobility solutions for urban and rural settings being tested.

A small yet significant step was taken by start-up WeTu in Kenya, and supported by the company Anywhere in Berlin, to solve rural and urban mobility challenges. What is their solution? Off-road electric cargo bikes and cargo boda boda to deliver goods and services in rural areas with bad or non-existent roads. Referred to as Steel Birds, these off-road cargo bikes are designed by Anywhere in Berlin but manufactured in microfactories in Africa. The first cargo e-bike produced in Kenya was the WeTu.

In urban areas, these bikes provide practical and cost-effective logistical ‘last mile’ services. In rural settings, they attempt to reach remote areas and marginalised villages to change their socio-economic status by connecting them to the economic system. Additionally, the photovoltaics and energy storage underpinning Steel Birds creates surplus energy that establishes a zero-cost mini microgrid, which increases familiarisation and acceptance of the microgrid by the populations. This has another valuable spillover effect: due to lack of clean water availability in Africa, solar power can be used to not only charge these bikes but also power up a water cleaning unit. The water can then be delivered to households. Lastly, the bikes can be used for multiple purposes, such as moving agricultural products or be converted into small-scale cooling vehicles. They can be used by multiple people from contractors to craftsmen to electricians in their daily life challenges.

From a global perspective, a few African countries are attempting to integrate e-mobility into their national policy targets to reduce carbon emissions in alignment with their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) or national climate action plans. This business is one small step in that direction. From a local perspective, the business is an example of multi-stakeholder collaboration between local entrepreneurs in Africa, start-ups in Europe, international governmental ministries (German BMU) and local populations. From a GloCal (global + local) perspective, it does a few things: connects rural markets to urban markets, links local markets to global markets, creates more visibility for local products, promotes local entrepreneurship by encouraging and empowering locally-owned and managed microfactories for e-mobility uptake, and fosters knowledge sharing by providing information on how to assemble the bikes.

Photo by Elliot Pannaman on Unsplash.