Tuverl founder’s grand plan for Africa’s public transport logjam
ONE thing that Hope Ndhlovu remembers about his days at Mpopoma High School is that he was always late to class.
Long after the last ring of the school bell had faded into the morning sky, Ndhlovu would walk through the school gates, anxious, as any learner would be, knowing that they had already missed a chunk of their daily dose of education.
A teacher eager to dish out punishment might have dismissed him as a lazy scholar who even slept through the screams of roosters announcing the arrival of a new dawn. Yet, there was a simple reason for Ndhlovu’s constant tardiness.
A brilliant pupil Ndhlovu only needed to point to the 9 As he clinched in his O-levels while at Ihlathi High School, to bear testament to his brilliance and dedication to his studies.
Yet, when he transferred to Mpopoma High School, he was confronted by the kind of transport blues unique to those that have to commute between Nkulumane and Mpopoma on a regular basis.
“One thing that has always stuck with me was problems with transport. I think this became pronounced when I shifted from Ihlathi to Mpopoma,” the 30-year-old told Sunday Life in an interview.
“When staying in Nkulumane, walking to Ihlathi was not really that difficult. It’s quite a distance but its walkable. Now you’re going to Mpopoma and you don’t have bus fare every day and there’s also no straight route from Nkulumane to D-Square. So, for the most part when I was in high school, I was almost always late. It was either transport was not there or it was inefficient. The crazy part is the impact on education. If you’re late to school all the time, what does it do to your performance? That’s the case with a lot of people. That is something that stuck with me.”
From Mpopoma, Ndhlovu went to Harvard University in America, where he got to witness what he describes as an efficient public transport system that is not without its own flaws. As an innovator studying Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Ivy League school, Ndhlovu’s mind turned to how he could somehow take the best of this imperfect system and implement it back home, to prevent transport woes from eating into any precocious young academic’s time, as had happened to him all those years ago.
“You look at how the public transport system is run in the first world countries. However, you can’t translate some of those ideas here because whereas there everything is centrally planned, here we have a self-organising system because different operators own their own cars,” he said.
Together with fellow Havard alumni Bahlakoana Mabetha, Ndhlovu founded Tuverl, whose flagship app that seeks to make public transport cheaper and more accessible to millions of commuters across Africa by helping public transport operators optimise their routes, reduce operational costs and increase revenue.
Last year, Tuverl won a grant from the Havard Innovation Challenge and followed it up by being among 31 startups selected for the Smart Cities Innovation Programme. However, before Tuverl took flight, it was confronted by a problem that crippled businesses, from giant corporations to the most innovative start-ups, the world over — Covid-19. As the pandemic wrought havoc with his plans to streamline Zimbabwe’s transport system using the Tuverl app in 2020, he found himself in Kenya a year later.
“I showed up a couple weeks before Covid19 really kicked in. So, when we showed up, kombis were immediately grounded at a time when we thought we had an idea to shake things up. Initially we thought it would be a couple more months before everything got back to normal. Instead, two months became two years. So last year I went to Kenya in March before coming back in December. What was interesting about Kenya is that I wasn’t now just comparing what they do in the first world and what we do here. I was in an African country with a similar public transport system,” he said.
It was while he was in Kenya that Ndhlovu realised that finance was the most urgent and immediate need for most African public transport operators.
“What I realised is that for owners of public transport systems, their biggest problem is access to finance. If you tell them that you have an app that helps them collect their money, you might be giving them a new problem because some might not want to ticket their collections. Their biggest problem is how they can expand their business. Most are informal operators that don’t have bank accounts.
“Even the big operators hardly use formal banking channels so what that does is that even if they approach a bank for a loan to use as operational capital, they can’t get it for several reasons. So, we talked to banks and asked why are you not giving these guys loans and it all came down to collateral and risk. So, we wondered how we could bridge the gap. We have a company that has technology that tracks all kinds of vehicles from taxis to mini-buses. You can use the app to call a cab and for mini-buses it provides a ticketing system. So, how could we bridge the gaps between banks and vehicle owners?” he said.
Ever the innovator, Ndhlovu decided to play the middleman for prospective public transportation vehicle owners and lending institutions that would usually be reluctant to take a punt on transport operators.
“So, how could we bridge the gaps between banks and vehicle owners? We realised that there’s something called asset financing whereby you do rent to own for those vehicles. As a company you purchase these vehicles, brand them and do the whole compliance procedure that’s related to the car. Once you have figured that out, you rent these cars to public transport operators for maybe let’s say 24 months and agree on a particular fee that they will give you monthly for that time. After that they own the car. That’s the deal. Basically, we are giving access to capital to drivers, without necessary the headache of red tape. We become a de-risking instrument for banks because we deal with compliance issues and the drivers as well. We don’t give out money but we give out asset. For now, is doing with taxis but the plan is to add kombis, add buses and trucks in future,” he said.
An avid chess player who became a national champion while he was in Form Two, Ndhlovu is always thinking two moves head. This may perhaps explain why Tuverl continues to evolve and change as it confronts new challenges and expectations.
“The idea evolved over time. What I imagined Tuverl would be and what we are doing now is not even the same thing. You learn new things. Even during Covid-19 we were thinking of new ideas and improvising… the most important thing we want to do now, is not just do asset financing for taxis but to do it for energy efficient cars that have a much lower greenhouse imprint. We import fuel so for us to be using old vehicles is bad for us as a country. We need to make the transition from old buses. Operators of those buses want to make that transition but who is going to give them the money to do so. They don’t want to stick to those old vehicles but we need to answer the question of where they are going to get finance to make the transition from. So, I think that’s the direction we are going in as Tuverl,” he said.
While some might think that the country’s top brains turn their back on the country once admitted to elite institutions, Ndhlovu said in his experience many were waiting to come back home and plough in back the knowledge they had acquired overseas.
“A lot of people I know that went to the US to study, most want to come back in some form or another. The question is how and when, and doing what. For me it just happened sooner. There are medical doctors there who recently graduated, who want to come back and open cancer labs and private hospitals so it’s just a question. For me, tech entrepreneurship is easier because it’s all about identifying a problem and solving it,” he said.