Uber in Africa: How Cash Payments & Budget Options Changed Ride Hailing Globally

Akkam,

That’s hello in Oromo.

Nando's is one of the continent’s most infamous brands when it comes to provocative advertising, cheeky copywriting and “react-vertising”, frequently blurring the lines between technology, pop culture and mainstream media. Their copy-based print ads with large bold font and quips have spread all over social media, email and the internet the last decade and created an iconic style, while their “Last Dictator” advert, was banned after ruffling a few feathers. The ad looks at a lifestyle of history’s most notorious dictators and had a meal put together by an African one from the southern hemisphere. Watch it.

At Nendo, we’re constantly looking for patterns and habits to unlock insights and new points of view. When working alongside South African agency Metropolitan Republic a few months ago, we shared a nuanced look at “millennial advertising” in Kenya and Africa at large, specifically, how the television commercials held identical (and overdone) themes. This ranged from the music beds to the post-production grading to the shot selection and even the cast of characters, environments and baritone monologues.

The specific project within which we’d shared the insight didn’t pan out. So it was with much surprise and amusement that we saw them deploy the insight and concept for the South African market this week. A Nando's 45-second TV ad contrasts the over-the-top approach of using “smoke, neon, fire, crazy outfits” with the flavours of South Africa and is a must-watch. The Afro-Portuguese casual dining chain plays to its tradition of provocateur in their market, as seen in the YouTube comments and conversations from South African cyberspace.

We’re glad to see our session yielded such a creative, in-your-face response.

On to this week’s tasting menu:

What to Sip (<30 sec read)

Before the tax was introduced, we used to transfer [about] UGX100b daily. But it has now reduced to about UGX60b or UGX50b. This is really bad news to us and the economy at large.

Uganda continues to grapple with the effects of its “Digital Tax”, with MTN Uganda’s mobile money General Manager Elsa Muzzolini, quoted above, telling the Daily Monitor that daily mobile money transactions have halved as a result and revenue to the government has also slowed from 50% to 30% due to reduced mobile money earnings.

A study by Canada-based telecoms intelligence firm Research ICT Solutions, as reported in Quartz, also piles in. The tax “could undermine economic growth in Uganda, reduce mobile operators’ income, and jeopardize thousands of jobs in the digital sector.”

Mobile operators have also recorded a 20% drop in data use. “Factoring in both the economic impact of broadband penetration and the price elasticity of mobile internet use,” Abdi Latif Dahir (a friend of the newsletter and reporter at Quartz) reports. “Research ICT Solution says the ad hoc fees could cost the Ugandan economy $750 million this year alone,” he concluded.

What to Nibble (<5 min read)

Five years have passed since Uber entered the African market. As Alon Lits, the ride-hailing app's Africa GM notes, there have been challenges -- one of the most interesting being cash payments, which led to requiring riders who choose the cash option to link their Uber and Facebook accounts for the safety of all parties, mostly the drivers.

Cash payments, piloted in Nairobi, were such a success that Uber rolled out the option to other markets, demonstrating how African consumers continue to define the customer experience in unique ways around the world.

Also mentioned is CHAPCHAP, Uber’s budget option in Kenya. Not to mention partnerships with lenders — WesBank in South Africa, Barclays and Stanbic in Kenya — to help drivers secure credit to purchase their own vehicles as a way to solve revenue splits between drivers and the car owners they work for. Should be said that mobile lending app Branch also has a partnership with Uber aimed at giving their drivers mobile money loans and credit.

Uber has a number of budget options in Africa which, according to one driver, are aimed at converting customers who in some markets like Kenya and Uganda would rather use a motorcycle taxi (bodaboda) rather than hail a cab.

• UberCHAPCHAP - Kenya (800cc compact cars for short rides)

• UberBODA - Uganda (motorcycle taxis)

• UberPOA - Dar-es-salaam (Tuk-tuk/Bajaj/3-wheeler rides)

• UberSCOOTER - Egypt (Vespa-like scooter rides)

What to Bite (<20 min read)

A.P. Møller-Maersk — we've all seen their containers on our roads. The Copenhagen-headquartered firm is the world's largest shipping conglomerate, and in mid-2017, they were hit by the most devastating cyberattack ever seen.

NotPetya, named from its resemblance to the ransomware Petya but without the option of receiving a key once you had paid the hackers, is estimated to have caused up to $10 billion in total damages.

WIRED investigates the origins of NotPetya, how it spread, the fallout and the future of cybersecurity and cyberwarfare -- with an interesting quirk included: a power blackout in Ghana saved the last existing global backup for a layer of Maersk's network after the malware had wiped everything from the company's other data centres.

Bottom of the Newsletter

With the cost of fuel in Kenya up thanks to an additional 16% value-added tax in effect, the economy is feeling it. Specifically public transport prices are going up. What better time to think about public transit in cities. This quote by Jimmi Gitonga struck me from a WhatsApp group I'm in this week:

What I have found over time is that the "matatu" is a "joint venture" between capital (vehicle owner) and labour (matatu crew). For the passengers, it is a service and for "regulators", it is a "cash cow", legally through licenses and illegally through "kitu kidogo" (bribes and unofficial tolls taken by law enforcement).

Pair reading of that with Niti Bhan’s work on the prepaid economy and her TED talk. Michael Kimani writes and interesting piece about why tech interventions for this sector (the mighty Safaricom, MasterCard, Google and others) failed. Mary Mwangi, founder and CEO of Data Integrated is working to bring order to the sector.

Pair that with this graphic from Naipolitans summing up the ecosystem.

À La Carte

This newsletter often doesn’t serve dessert with our tasting menu of links, but in the spirit of the silence from the last few weeks, take this on the house:

• The Guardian takes a look at skim reading and its effect on us (plus our kids) and how we process information. With more and more pixels on more and more screens clamouring for our attention, “less attention and time will be allocated to slower, time-demanding deep reading processes, like inference, critical analysis and empathy, all of which are indispensable to learning at any age.”

• Pair this with another piece on teens that don’t (yes, you read that right) use social media. This looks to young people who intentionally avoid being on the platforms and their very thoughtful and insightful reasons why. However old (or young) you are, there are valuable lessons there.

• On Instagram, ZeroFOX, a research firm, has built “a machine learning algorithm, reading descriptions for trigger words like "money" and scanning pictures for bank logos, receipts or bundles of cash” to weed out Instagram scammers, according to The Verge.

• If you’ve never encountered an Instagram scam account in the wild, a brief MO is as follows: stacks of cash, expensive cars, designer label bags and clothing, with the hook being a mysterious “investment opportunity”, the details of which are shared with followers in the DM. The Guardian had a fascinating longread a while ago on Instagram scammers that’s well worth a look.

Analysis of #FreeBobiWine: 0-500k tweets from incarceration to independence

As always, we appreciate your time reading this and missed a week in between (and are making up for it with a longer-than-average newsletter).

Happy to hear back from many of you who reply to this email to kickstart a conversation with what’s on your mind.

We’re doing our trainings once again and have one on customer experience coming up and one on digital strategy for 2019 happening in October. Newsletter subscribers get a discount and I appreciate your referrals. Happy to send you the details.

Until the next one.

Mark & Team Nendo.

Main Image: Uber