Why Uber’s imminent Nairobi launch could be its best move in Africa yet

by Muyiwa Matuluko

TechMoran reports that Uber, the disruptive luxury taxi e-Hailing service will launch in Nairobi this January.

This is coming after several months of speculation about the San Francisco based startup’s intention to expand to Kenya’s capital city. Uber is currently present in 6 continents across 53 cities, including 5 African cities – Cairo, Cape Town, Durban Johannesburg and Lagos.

uber-cool

Expanding to Nairobi is a logical next step for the startup. In fact, one would have expected Nairobi to be one of the first African cities were Uber would launch, considering the maturity of the market (particularly in the area of payments processing). For reasons best known to them, Uber currently only accepts card payments – no cash, prepaid wallets or the like. Customers bills are charged directly to their cards so they are forced to enter card details on sign up. Especially for a continent like Africa, this presents an obstacle for adoption.

The average cardholder is usually sceptic about releasing their card details, especially not to a relatively unknown company. However, the ubiquity of Mobile Money in Kenya gives Uber a very viable alternative. Uber can begin to look into integrating services like M-Pesa into their app, so payments can be charged via a channel customers are already most comfortable with – mobile airtime balance. This has the potential to drive massive adoption. Indeed there have been reports in the past of Uber’s intention to integrate Mobile Money into their service. Perhaps this is why it took so long to launch in Nairobi?

Uber is set to launch in Nairobi on the 22nd of January during EatOut Kenya’s Nairobi Restuarant Week campaign. According to sources, the startup has already signed up 30 cars to pilot the campaign. Uber will have established local services like Easy Taxi and MaraMoja to contend with.

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

cool good eh love2 cute confused notgood numb disgusting fail