SafariShare · 12 October 2020 · 2 min read
We have been selected as one of nine startups for the 2020/2021 cohort of the Africa Transformative Mobility Accelerator (ATMA), run by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the Africa Mobility Initiative (AMI).
The cohort was chosen from 112 applications across Kenya and Uganda. We are the programme starting today, 12 October 2020.
ATMA is a six-month acceleration programme providing:
The partner network behind the programme includes the University of Nairobi's C4DLab, Shell Foundation, the Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative (TUMI), GIZ, and UN-HABITAT. As a young Ugandan startup, access to that network at this stage is significant.
We are a carpooling platform with growing user numbers and a clear sense of the problem we are solving. What we are still working out is how to measure and communicate impact rigorously — how many journeys, how many kilometres, how much CO2 avoided, and what those numbers mean for the broader case for shared mobility in Uganda.
The accelerator gives us a framework for that. It also gives us something harder to quantify: a peer group of founders across East Africa working on mobility problems from different angles, and a set of relationships with organisations that have seen these models scale in other contexts.
SafariShare connects private drivers with passengers on shared intercity routes in Uganda. The solution offers both — filling empty seats in private cars with passengers heading in the same direction. The environmental and economic benefits are the same mechanism.
We are at an early but real stage. The platform works. Trips complete. Users come back. The challenge now is scale — more drivers, more routes, more reliability. The ATMA programme is an opportunity to think more rigorously about how we get there.
We will share updates from the programme over the coming months.