“Lags in the transportation system are a big issue in many
countries and it is something that is often overlooked even though people use
it on a daily basis. When transportation is inefficient, it curbs people’s
accessibility to healthcare, education and jobs,” says Sonia Kabra, the
co-founder of Magic Bus Ticketing – text-based ticketing service that aims to
make bus transport more reliable and accessible by reducing waiting times and
increasing the productivity of both commuters and buses starting with African
countries.
Along with three other co-founders, she recently
participated in the Hult Prize competition in New York where Magic Bus won a
seed capital funding of $1 million.
The annual competition challenges student entrepreneurs to
come up with solutions for the world’s most pressing problems. The prize is
offered in funded by Bertil Hult, founder of EF Education First, in partnership
with Former US President Bill Clinton and the Clinton Global Initiative. The
competition is hosted by Hult International Business School.
The challenge this year was related to crowded urban places
and how one can better connect people to goods and services. And the aim for
the participants was to double the income of one million people by 2020. Magic
Bus was one of the 25,000 participants in the competition.
All four cofounders of Magic Bus – Iman Cooper, Sonia Kabra,
Wyclife Omondi, and Leslie Ossete come from different countries – USA, India,
Nairobi, and Kenya respectively.
And they had all witnessed varying problems with respect to
transportation in their countries. In Kenya, they knew how an unorganised and
unpredictable bus transportation service leads to people spending three to four
hours of the day waiting around for busses, or missing out on important
opportunities just because they could not find a bus to commute.
“Inspired by the shared economy model of UBER and Airbnb, we
thought that we will do something similar. But the market we were going into, a
smartphone app would not have been useful because most people don’t have the
Internet. But most people have mobile phones,” says Sonia, adding that the
mobile phone adoption in Kenya is 85%.
This was how the team came up with the idea of an offline
service that would use Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) gateway
and SMS service to help people book their seats on in-city buses, know the time
of arrival of the buses, fares, etc. USSD is basically a Global System for
Mobile (GSM) communication technology used to send messages between a mobile
phone and an application program in the network. The team members were also
aware of the fact that m-Pesa, a mobile-based money transfer service, was first
launched in Kenya by telecom company Safaricom and is widely used by people there
for day-to-day transactions like grocery shopping.
The team developed Magic Bus technology in a way that it
uses m-Pesa for transactions for buying bus tickets.
Commuters just have to dial a code after which they receive
a USSD menu. They use the message to select pick-up and drop locations, and
Magic Bus sends them an SMS with the bus details including the expected time of
arrival and fare. Commuters can then pre-book the seats using m-Pesa. The
service gives the expected time of arrival with the help of GPS tracking
system.
“In Kenya, the bus system is privatised and informal. So
there is a lot of fluctuation in prices. Also, the buses wait at the main stop
for the seats to get occupied and all the people waiting at the stops after
that have to wait for 3-4 hrs every day. There are no fixed times for busses,”
says Sonia, adding that the team is trying to move to an offline platform for
the drivers as well.
They have used the beta version of the app for pilot testing
in five busses in Kenya over a period of nine weeks during which about 2,000
people used the service. 73% of the commuters used it more than three times in
one week.
Born and brought up in Jalgaon, Maharashtra, Sonia went to
Hong Kong to finish High School in the United World College and then to Earlham
College in the USA to pursue liberal arts. She has always wanted to start a
business of her own and is excited to live in Kenya very soon. The team hired a
group of 20 volunteers to help train the locals on using the service and they
are now planning to use their funds to expand to other African countries as
well.