The Challenge 

For many rural women, days are busy. Not only do they do 60% of the agricultural work, but manage the household as well. Often the biggest use of their time is spent walking, getting from one place to another. Women walk long distances to fetch water, or get to the river to do the dishes or clean the clothes.  It can be a long balancing act, carrying goods on their heads, to get to the market, to sell or bringing home the groceries. Faced with a lack of services and infrastructure, rural women carry a great part of the burden of providing water and fuel for their households.  For example, according to UN Women, collectively, women from Africa spend about 40 billion hours a year fetching water.

By the end of 2020, there were 10 million electric cars on the world’s road and more than 70 new 4-wheel car models designed. Yet in rural Africa, where women still spend hours walking long distances and carrying heavy loads, the potential of electric 3 and 2 wheelers to overcome last mile mobility is still untapped.

In many parts of rural Africa, neither regular supplies of energy nor petrol are available.  This means most transport is expensive, often unreliable and doesn’t reach many rural off-road areas. While there has been investment in building main roads, there is still a huge network of rural areas that depend on gravel roads that are not serviced by regular and reliable transport.

Rural farmers are often far away from main transport roads - fewer than 40 percent of rural Africans live within two kilometers of an all-season road. They suffer huge cost in both time and finances to get their goods to market.

It is estimated that moving goods can be 2-3 times higher than in other more developed parts of the world. Not only because of slow travel times due to the poor state of roads, but because of ‘non-physical’ transport costs related to delays, poor competition in the transport industry leading to higher prices, and a dependency on fossil fuels.

Tough, sturdy, electric transport could provide an avenue for rural communities, to overcome these barriers to mobility. They could ultimately provide the incentive for increased economic activity, creating new commercial markets and generating more sustained rural activity.