The largest company in East and Central Africa, Safaricom is partnering with Craft Silicon to launch a taxi service called Littlecabs in about three weeks. According to Safaricom CEO, Bob Collymore, the telco will develop the mobile app, offer the network connectivity (because they are after all, a telco), turn the registered vehicles into Wi-Fi hotspots and provide a payments processor (they own M-Pesa).
Odipo Riaga from Kachwanya doesn’t think they will succeed, and I’m inclined to agree. Asides from the fact that Uber sabi* the work, there’s the fact that to attract enough drivers to make it worthwhile, they’ll need to pass the extra cost on to users, who generally do not like bearing financial brunts while big companies light financial blunts. Chicken and Egg, lol.
Source – Kachwanya
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Sabi is used colloquially in Nigerian pidgin to mean know. As in, Uber is good at what they do.
