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Nimble Electric Trucks Are Supercharging African Trade
Esperance Dushakimana looks at her field of potato in Musanze district in North Rwanda. “It is hard,” she says. “We till the land, sow the seeds, reap the harvest and then watch helplessly while at least a fifth of it perishes before it reaches the market.” Barely 30 miles away in Rubavu, mushroom farmer Vincent Ngamije is forced to sell his harvest on the cheap across the border in Congo, instead of in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, where he can get a better price. “The market in DRC is barely 40 minutes away, and in contrast, my mushrooms can reach Kigali only after spending five hours in a warm truck,” he says. “Barely 40 percent will survive.”
Esperance Dushakimana, potato farmer in Musanze, North Rwanda. Credit: Geetanjali Krishna
In Rwanda’s agrarian, undulating landscape, farmers pedaling up or madly careening down hills, on bicycles piled four feet high with bananas, potatoes and other produce, are a common sight. Like Dushakimana and Ngamije, most farmers here either watch their harvest spoil, or grow only as much as they can get to market. The issue is global: About 25 to 30 percent of food produced worldwide is wasted. The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) estimates that every year, about USD $400 billion worth of food is lost before it ever reaches the market. But in Rwanda, where over 4.8 million people (41 percent of the population) are undernourished and approximately one-fifth of the population is food insecure, food waste seems even more wasteful.
Better logistics is an obvious solution, but it is not as simple as that. Long-haul diesel trucks have a massive carbon footprint; the US Environmental Protection Agency estimates that in 2022 more than three percent of all carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions came from them.
“Traditional car manufacturers have failed to produce vehicles that suit a third of the world’s population, predominantly those in the Global South,” says Simon Davis. He is the founder and CEO of the UK-based Ox Delivers, which has developed, according to the company website, “the world’s first purpose-designed electric truck” for Africa. It was launched in Rwanda in 2021 and is almost 10 times cheaper to run compared to existing alternatives. And it offers farmers the cost-effective choice of renting the space they need for as little as a dollar depending on weight and distance, instead of the entire truck (for about $500), to transport their agricultural produce from farm to market. Refrigeration capacity can be added to all these trucks (in fact “cold” trucks service Rwanda’s dairy farmers in Kivu, Western Rwanda) and the company has also developed a mountable cool box for non-refrigerated trucks.
Farmers markets like this one in North Rwanda are not resilient to hot weather. Credit: Geetanjali Krishna
The story of Ox began in 2013, when Sir Torquil Norman, the British pilot and toy entrepreneur famous for creating the Polly Pocket line of dolls, tasked the Formula 1 race car designer Gordon Murray to design a vehicle to transport goods in low-income countries. Murray’s design — a somewhat squat truck made of interchangeable and easy-to-maintain parts that could be shipped in easy-to-assemble flatpacks — was practical, even if unlikely to win any auto beauty contests. In the next few years, Ox transformed into a logistics company, offering farmers “ride shares” for their produce for less than a dollar.
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