Tech start-ups drive change for Nigerian truckers

by Neil Munshi

Tech start-ups drive change for Nigerian truckers Uber-style apps are transforming industry rife with inefficiency and corruption Share on Twitter (opens new window) Share on Facebook (opens new window) Share on LinkedIn (opens new window) Save Neil Munshi in Tin Can Island AUGUST 27, 2019 Print this page17 Until a year ago, Friday Ighodaro spent three or four nights a month getting pulled out of his 30-tonne Steyr truck on the unlit highways of rural Nigeria by armed robbers. They know that long-haul truckers carry cash advances for provisions along the way, he said. “Nowadays in Nigeria when you carry money, it’s very dangerous,” he said. Bandits prowl the roads across the country, “but now when they stop you on the road, when they see the Honeywell sign, they know we don’t carry cash.” Mr Ighodaro is an owner-operator who hauls grain to every corner of Nigeria for Honeywell Flour Mills and other clients of Kobo360, a 20-month-old start-up which announced earlier this month that it had raised $30m in debt and equity in a funding round led by Goldman Sachs. The company uses an “Uber for logistics” model to connect drivers and fleet operators to companies bringing goods into and around Africa’s most populous country, and also Togo, Ghana and Kenya, as it attempts to bring a cashless, app-based paperless system to an industry mired in reams of paperwork and handshake relationships.

Source: https://www.ft.com/content/c6a3d1f2-c27d-11e9-a8e9-296ca66511c9

[Author：Gerard]