Meeting with Technical Innovator Mr. Eric Mibuari of Kenya

I had an excellent introductory phone meeting with Mr. Eric Mibuari from Laare, Kenya. Eric was a phenomenal undergraduate at MIT and is now earning his MS at Stanford! He is the founder of LACOTEC, the Laare Community Technology Center and has been a part of development of the MIT-AITI program. Given his background and passion for developing technologies WITH communities that are in emerging markets, I thought it would be great to include him in the discussion of my project. 

As I spoke with Mr. Mibuari he discussed technological progress that Kenya has made over the past decade. In particular, Strathmore University students have been at the forefront of software development and cutting edge computing technology. Many of these students participated in the MIT-AITI program as well, and are also a part of exciting projects such as iHub. 

We laid out two potential use-cases of the GSM/GPRS Shield one in the field of transportation and the other in the field of agriculture, with a stronger emphasis on the former. This post details our discussion about the transportation scenario.

An example of matatus are shown at the beginning of this video.

In Kenya, as in many other developing communities, people use mini-buses, called Matatus, for public transportation. They are a low-cost solution to getting people around particularly in developing countries. There is this very cool low-tech ecosystem around these buses, where it may not be clear to the lay person how to find out the  mini-bus schedule in a so called traditional way.  Instead it is organized differently, but equally as effective as other public but transportation systems. First there is a person that owns one or a fleet of mini-buses. This person will hire a driver and conductor for each bus. The driver does just that, he is in charge of driving the routes, which may vary at time. The conductor collects the money from the passengers and rounds up passengers at each stop. Note that the matatus are visually quite different in Nairobi than in most parts of Kenya. In Nairobi the mini-buses are "high-tech" with gorgeous exterior designs and sound systems with TVs in the interior. Note that the cost for a ride varies based on the passengers (riders) destination.

Another example of high-tech sophisticated matatus are shown is this video.

One of the challenges that owners of matatus have with their conductors and drivers is honesty and the ability to clearly determine the daily revenue. More specifically, there is no clear system to know how many routes the driver of a matatu has taken per day, nor is there a system to know how many persons were on each route. As a result the owner has to trust the word of the driver and conductor as to how much revenue they earned during the day. This is problematic when some conductors and drivers are dishonest about their daily revenue, or just do not have an accurate account of their daily revenue.

We are proposing a solution using the GSM/GPRS Shield and Arduino that will aggregate route and occupancy data for the matatu owners. For example, we can use the shield to count/sense the number of trips between two mini-bus terminals

There are a number of intriguing research challenges. For example, often times these buses are filled beyond capacity where passengers may sit on laps of others. This way the driver and conductor earn more revenue, by  simply stating to the owner that the bus was full, but they do not s include the money they earned from the "overfull" additional passengers. Another challenge or concern, is tampering with  our final product/solution. 


In general there are a number of exciting ideas occurring in Kenya. A key example is Equity bank, that has changed the banking industry in Kenya by allowing those (the majority) with little funds to bank with them. Essentially "banking the unbanked". Equity bank now has millions of cusotmers and has risen to one of the top 3 banks in Kenya. They are an Africa focused bank and have a foundation that is making great strides with improving education in Kenya. There are a number of other innovative ideas emerging from Kenya.