Tri-hopper's jostle to African connectivity & women empowerment

Women in the tricycle driver's seat have a transformative impact on the continent's economic and gender picture.

Sanlunche, a ubiquitous tricycle in rural China, is being reimagined as a powerful tool for change in Africa. Thanks to Shantha Bloemen, founder and managing director of the startup Mobility for Africa, and in collaboration with the Future Laboratory at Tsinghua University, the sanlunche—also colloquially known as the "tri-hopper (sanbengzi)" in Mandarin—has been rebranded as the Hamba, a Ndebele word meaning "let's go."

Locally assembled and equipped with a durable battery, modular design, and battery-swapping system, the Hamba is designed to provide last-mile transport solutions for small-scale African farmers, particularly women. The introduction of the Hamba has already brought notable economic benefits to these farmers, allowing them to increase their productivity and market reach. More importantly, it is driving a significant shift in the role of women, empowering them through enhanced mobility and economic opportunity.

Like two previous stories on The East is Read about contraceptive implants for African women and circumcision devices for African men, Shantha Bloemen shared insights into her business ventures and experiences working with local African farmers at YiXi, a Ted-style talk in China with input from the Center for Global Development and Health Communication Research at Tsinghua University.

The video of Bloemen's speech is available on YouTube.

Go, Hamba！ 将电力革命带到非洲农村

Go, Hamba! Bringing Electric Revolution to Rural Africa

Hello everyone [speaking in Mandarin], my name is Shantha Bloemen and I'm the founder and managing director of a startup called Mobility for Africa working in Zimbabwe and southern Africa. We are trying to adapt the sanlunche to create a robust e-tricycle for rural small-scale farmers in Africa.

So as you can tell by my accent, I'm not African. I grew up in Australia. My relationship with Africa started when I was at university and I studied African history. After I finished my degree, I wanted to go beyond books and ended up doing a volunteer stint in northern Zambia. I arrived in a village in the north, and like everyone else there, well, like the women in the village, I had to learn to collect water from the village river which was about 3 kilometers from my house. This was a very arduous task, having to learn to carry a 20-litre bucket of water on my head and not spill it on that journey back.

I have to confess that without the support and help and kindness of the other women in the village I most probably never would have washed or been able to cook. I discovered that African women are really superheroes and they make something very difficult look very easy.

And I realized living in this village, this community, that mobility was a huge crisis in a way. It impacted not just on the need for women to walk every day long distances to fetch water but it meant crops rotted in the field because they couldn't get to the market; kids dropped out of school because the distances were too long. And the consequences of children getting vaccinated or mothers delivering in health clinics were often quite dire and could put them at terrible risk.

After Zambia, I spent 30 years working in the continent and most of those years for UNICEF. My job was to tell the story of forgotten children and families living in remote areas. I was constantly reminded by my experiences in Zambia that nothing had changed, that rural women were still living in a time warp in a way where they had this arduous task of collecting water and carrying huge things on their head long distances.

It was essentially something that had become entrenched, that had been normalized. It's not just time that they're spending that they could be doing other productive things, but when we talked to them and we conducted focus groups, we also discovered it's physical drudgery. It's exhausting. It's what I remembered from Zambia--how difficult it was to carry that bucket.

When things are entrenched and normalized, it means it's very hard to change the status quo, which has been part of our challenge--to convince people that we have a problem that needs to be solved.

Let me give you some context. I would say that it's not just last-mile mobility but there is a transport crisis in a continent as big as Africa. Basically, we compare it to other parts of the world, there's a huge shortage of vehicles. It's 44 vehicles estimated per thousand in Africa as a whole. In China, it's 115 per thousand. And in the US, it's 838 per thousand. And that figures distort the division between urban and rural because most of those vehicles are predominantly in urban areas. So it's much more acute and dire in rural.

Yet the reality is that most Africans, 70% of the continent's 1.3 billion people, are living in rural areas. Small-scale farmers make up 80% of farmland and they produce 80% of the continent's food. So they're very critical. But yet, many of them live huge distances from a market. Most of them live (more than) 2 kilometers from an all-purpose road which may not even be paved.

The other thing we discovered was that at least 20% to 30% of incomes were spent on the cost of getting your goods to the market or getting your kids to school, or going to the clinic. It's a huge income burden. And while there are motorbikes, increasingly, they are not great for rural women. They have to straddle, and most women, especially older women, will wear a skirt. If you have to carry a baby as well as, you know, a big 50kg bag of fertilizer or seed, it's not possible to put on a motorbike. And then finally, most of the transport is controlled by men, which makes it even harder.

So my life changed quite dramatically in 2014. I had a job offer to come to China. I essentially entered a world that was changing faster than anywhere I had ever lived before. There was new ideas, new innovation, ideas going to scale quickly in transport, in communication, in shopping, in shared economy--that we didn't need to own things, we could use them when we needed them. And of course, transport was ubiquitous. We had high-speed trains, we had subways, we had shared bikes, we had the sanlunche. It was affordable and it was reliable. And it was also increasingly going electric.

It contrasted very much from my day job where I was stuck in a lot of meetings, and there was a lot of talk about the problem but not really on the practical solutions. Inspired by what was going on around me, I started learning more about social enterprise, entrepreneurship, impact investment. And so in 2017, I threw caution to the wind, and I thought, why don't I try and bring the electric vehicle revolution happening here to rural women in Africa, and we change the way they travel?

So to the trepidation of my parents and at the ripe old age of 46, I said goodbye to my UN paycheck, and I started Mobility for Africa. I returned to the continent to start this new journey. I did a pitch deck and a business plan and tried to raise the money, thinking it was a brilliant idea. But friends quickly told me that it was not going to be easy to raise money for something that was so new and hadn't been tested.

So I came back to China in 2018 and reconnected with friends and colleagues from Tsinghua University. It all started here. Professor Xu (Yingqing) was an amazing academic here and runs the Lifelong Learning Lab with his director Emma Peng. They listened to my idea and they said, we'll find some students and you can start a pilot.

So we found five PhD students, all from very different backgrounds, from sociology, to energy, to automotive mechanics. And those students helped us to design our pilot.

We knew at the beginning that we didn't want to just import the tricycle--that wouldn't work. We needed to build an African tricycle. And we also needed to give it an African name. So we called it Hamba, which means "let's go" in Ndebele, which is one of the main languages in Zimbabwe.

My cofounder Felicity had a farm about 120 kilometers out of Harare, so we were able to launch our pilot at her farm working with the small-scale farmers in that community.

It was all a bit crazy. We had a lot to address. And the students did a lot of preparatory work and desktop reading. I mean, how can the tricycle work for African roads? Does it need modifications and changes? Can women drive? This is motorised transport; most of them may have learned to ride a bicycle but many even not a bicycle. How do we make it affordable? How do we make the business model work so we could raise the type of investment we needed to scale? And ultimately, we wanted to go electric, so how do we charge the tricycle? And where does the electricity come from? Things I knew very little about when I started.

The beauty was that the pilot helped us start. We had 50 tricycles arrive. We crowdfunded. We had the students arrive. We had technicians from Hebei that came with the tricycles and taught local technicians how to assemble. Within 2 weeks, we launched the pilot.

The first year of piloting involved working with women. We had 30 tricycles we deployed. We put the women in groups of three and they rented the tricycle and they shared it.

And it was very interesting because at first, the men were quite jealous--Why are the women getting this transport? Why weren't they? But over this journey, they understood that if their women had more time and could do more things, they were earning more money and income, and they wouldn't nag them as much. So we've actually seen a huge shift in gender relations with the introduction of the tricycle.

Part of this stage was how do we teach them how to drive. So we developed a driving course, a 5-day driving course where we taught them about road safety and the basic controls of a Hamba and they had to be certified and qualified. And this is a quote from one of our women that she could not believe that she could drive. So just the pure excitement of our women who graduated and got their certificate was incredibly inspiring.

We then, in the second phase of the pilot, added more tricycles, so we had about 60 tricycles in total. And we started experimenting with the businesses that they could operate. So we had some women apply. They were groups of women trading, and they had a business where the transport could be used to help their income. So here you see women going door to door selling secondhand clothes. This obviously meant they didn't need to sit in a market; they could go door to door.

Here is one of our new customers, Susan, who has a bakery at home. And she's now able to transport a hundred loaves of bread which she can sell every day. She lives 10 kilometers from where she sells the bread and she can go door to door. She's increased her income exponentially.

We also set up a mini DiDi. So we basically knew that in a community, there was a huge demand, and we didn't just want the wealthiest people in the community to own the transport or maybe use it like a car and then it sits all day. We wanted it to be used all day, every day. So we commission drivers, women who would use it as a transport and logistics service. This proved incredibly viable because there was huge demand as you can appreciate, it can carry people, it can carry goods, it can carry produce. And they could call their driver and book a time. They could get grandma delivered to the clinic if she needed something; babies needed to go. So it was very much proven that was a great business.

In agriculture, we also saw huge economic gain. These ladies, their farm was 3 kilometers from their house. With the transport, they were able to take more fertilizer and manure they could make at home and were able to farm more of their land. So their yield increased exponentially, and then obviously, they could make more money.

So we got to this stage where after the first 2 years, we knew that the demand was there, we knew that women could drive, we knew it could have a catalytic impact on incomes. But essentially, we were faced with this challenge: How do we charge the Hamba? And where does the electricity come from? And also, ultimately, how do we find the right battery? And I'll tell you a little bit about that journey.

But first, as background, in addition to a mobility crisis, we have an energy crisis in the continent. We have a deficit of reliable energy, and that's particularly acute in rural areas. So across the continent, we see 55% of the population without access to electricity. And then when you do have electricity, it may or may not be reliable. The grid is often unreliable. So people supplement it with using diesel generators if you can afford it, because diesel is expensive; it's not available in rural areas. Petrol is imported, it's expensive, and it's also a huge contributor to why we have a mobility crisis because it requires foreign currency and it's usually focused in urban areas. So in rural areas, petrol is much more expensive and often just carried in smaller quantities.

The energy crisis meant that while in theory, electric mobility could be a game changer, we needed to obviously make sure we had enough energy to charge our batteries. The good news is that the cost of solar and the cost of putting up renewable energy, small mini-grids is now much more affordable and durable.

I realized that while we'd taken off the shelf the tricycle and we were working on it, the battery that was used in China was a lead acid battery because the sanlunche is primarily used for the poorest people, and in rural areas in China there is electricity. But it would not work in rural Africa. It was not appropriate. We took off the shelf lithium batteries and we also realized, primarily, they were for storage and they wouldn't withstand very bumpy roads. So essentially, I realized I needed to find my own Elon Musk.

The battery technology, we did a mapping, we hunted the sector in China. And obviously, the big guys weren't going to talk to a startup testing a new idea in a rural African context. But we were very, very fortunate to connect with Richard Zhao.

So he is an engineer with a PhD in lithium. And he has worked at Tesla. And he did actually sit very close to Elon Musk.

I was like, wow, I had my golden ticket.

Richard was willing to work with us over the last 3 years. Obviously, Covid didn't help because we had to do things remotely. But we basically spent the last 3 years working and testing battery and charging system that would work for rural Africa because I knew from our pilot that we needed a battery that was basically going to take the tricycle longer distances. The lead-acid had taken them tricycle 50 kilometers at best and that was not going to work. The distance in our rural pilot area was at least 15 to 20 kilometers between the health clinic and the town and the market and people's homes.

So I said to Richard, I want a battery that's gonna go 100 kilometers. I also want the safest lithium chemistry. We don't want, you know, fires to cause problems. And we also wanted a battery that was going to be long-lasting. We didn't want something that would only last a short life cycle and then have to be replaced because obviously we already have a problem with recycling and waste management. So it was critical that we had a battery that could go many cycles.

And we also wanted integrated storage. We put in a charging station. This was our first charging station.

And now what we have is a modular system where our batteries basically act two purposes. So they're gonna have one life in the tricycle, and we're hoping that they're gonna take the tricycle, maybe 50,000 to 60,000 kilometers. And then as they start to degenerate, we can use them as storage. But also we can potentially, what we want to test now is other productive tools that farmers can use to increase their productivity.

As you can see, the solar is there. We've decided to choose sites which have solar and also electricity because the African governments are focusing on rural electrification, and we need quite a lot of energy. So we've created a system, where we can charge from any source of energy and it goes straight into an inverter, and it's integrated. So it's much more efficient than when I first launched in 2019

We've also got a battery-swapping system. The batteries are big and heavy, but as you can see, these are our female technicians. They are strong enough to swap the batteries.

We set up fleets in a 30-kilometer radius, and then we set up swapping locations. People can obviously come to the charging hub and swap, but we also deliver different locations to reduce their mileage back to a charging station.

We've set up a factory. We started with a factory. This is our second factory for assembling the tricycles. And with Richard's support, we've also started doing local assembly of the batteries.

Opening of new Hamba assembly facility

We've designed a very smart battery management system that regulates and manages the cells to make sure they're going to last those many cycles.

But obviously, all of that wouldn't work if we didn't have local skills and local people to understand and maintain and service. One of the great things about the partnership with Fourier Energy and Richard's team is they've come back and forth, especially since Covid ended. So we've had technicians come to train our staff.

In this photo, you see Rumbie who's one of our young engineers and she came to China and is learning. So it's very much been a cross-cultural technology transfer experience. We've got very young, capable, smart people in Africa. So even if people don't have much formal education, they're hungry to learn.

Richard and his team also helped us to build a curriculum. So we developed a 1-month curriculum for low-skilled, semi-skilled workers. And we pilot-tested it at one of the local vocational training schools. The 20 students around now are working for us at Mobility for Africa and our sites. But obviously, if Africa is going to transition to green transport, we're going to need to build those skills over the long term.

We also realized when we were pilot testing, and especially when Covid hit and with my experience at UNICEF, that we wanted to focus on the whole community. And that meant to me service delivery. I had, as I said, spent plenty of time in rural Africa, been to rural clinics with no transport, been to local police stations with no transport. It's very hard to do your job when you have no transport. Igava clinic is in our pilot site. They cover a 30-kilometer radius. They have to provide health services in that 30-kilometer radius. There are about 6,000 people in that community, and they had no transport.

So the team there has done a remarkable job. Sister Chidemo, who's seen in this photo, and her team of six workers have all been trained. They've set up mobile sites within that in their catchment area where they go and they deliver vaccination coverage. They were doing Covid, they were doing HPV, they were doing childhood vaccinations. When the baby is born, they can take the mother back to her house with the baby. They can check up on people that are HIV positive or TB. They have TB who need their medication, and may not want to come to the clinic or may not be well enough to come to the clinic.

So they have been remarkable in using that transport. You can see they're the best-performing clinic in the district. Just with transport, they were able to conduct a polio campaign. Last year, there was an outbreak of polio, sadly. So just being able to go and move has been remarkable. Before this, they would have to call the district and request transport. Often what happened is, even if there was a motorbike or a vehicle, there may not be petrol to get that vehicle to that rural community. So they're stuck.

But the beauty is that what we're hoping to do now is actually test with the Ministry of Health to get more evidence to show how electric tricycles can make a huge difference in terms of health outcomes. And the charging technology we've designed could be used both for cold chain storage and providing basic lights and electricity to the clinic, but also be used, obviously, for running a small fleet and having a huge impact on the community.

Just to end, I think we're all aware that we're living in a climate crisis. We have got a rapidly changing climate. And Africa is on the front line of that climate crisis. Africa has contributed about 4% of global emissions, and yet it is really taking a big impact on what's happening. This year alone, in southern Africa, we had a terrible drought--45 days with no rain during the rainy season. So it's real; it's happening now.

I'm a big believer that we can't wait for the perfect solution; we can't wait for the perfect time; that we have to just move now, and with a bit more urgency. So we've really tried to prove over the last 5 years, and we're now ready for scale. We want to go China big. We've proven that if you can introduce a fleet of e-tricycles in a community, and you can share that transport, you can have a catalytic impact.

In terms of the business model, as I said, we've tried many different formulas. And now we've basically simplified our formula this year. So we're still committed to women. 75% of our drivers and customers will always be women. We do a lease-to-purchase. They apply, they have to be qualified. And then they buy back the tricycle to own it fully after 12 months. But they also commit to a certain number of battery swaps. Obviously, they don't own the batteries. We swap them at a fee and they have to do a minimum of 4 battery swaps a week, which means they're using that Hamba at least 400 kilometers. We don't want the Hamba sitting.

We've also really focused on building the skills. Our tricycles that we brought to Wedza in 2019 are still working, are still operational. Yes, we've had to replace spare parts, but the idea is that they should be able to last if they are looked after and serviced. That's a big part of what we're building with our ecosystem of aftercare services and building the skills.

This is one of our drivers, Mavis. She's picked up one of her customers. They've come straight from the field where they've loaded the Hamba with tomatoes, which means no produce is going to waste because it can't be carried on head. She's been delivered to the market where now she can sell it and hopefully earn more income.

I think this journey has taught me that Mobility for Africa means many different things. It's about renewable energy, it's about battery technology, it's about mobility, it's about the freedom that mobility can unlock.

And one lovely story. I was in one of our sites and one of our drivers told me how she delivered a baby in the Hamba on the way to the clinic. The baby, named King, and the mother were delivered safely. That's the sort of real impact that we're having.

Just to conclude, we have a saying, an African proverb that I think of often. It says when you want to go fast, go alone; when you want to go far, go together. Mobility for Africa has been a much longer journey than I ever anticipated, but it's been a journey where I've been very lucky to have great allies and people that believe in the journey. We still have a long way to go. We've got 300 tricycles now which feels tiny in China but we have big ambitions. We want every small-scale farmer and every rural woman to be able to have a tricycle.

So thank you, xiexie!