'Shantha Takes on Toyota --Toyota Blinks' by Tom McDermott

It was a pleasant surprise this morning to come across a NY Times article (A Humble 3-Wheel Electric Vehicle Lands Toyota in Federal Court) which mentions a former UNICEF staffer, Shantha Bloemen, We had never crossed paths in our UNICEF lives, or for that matter, in XUNICEF. Her story and the story of the organzation she founded seems intriguing.According to the article, Shantha is a former UNICEF communications officer from western Australia who has taken on a "David vs. Goliath- style" challenge against the giant Toyota. She filed a federal lawsuit last month in Los Angeles alleging the automaker stole electric three-wheeler technology from her Zimbabwean NGO and handed it to a for-profit Kenyan company. The case, filed in U.S. federal court, already appears to have prompted some rethinking at Toyota, whose only public comment so far is that it is "investigating."

Bloemen founded Mobility for Africa to build simple electric vehicles helping farmers — women in particular — get produce to market.

Bloemen spent 21 years in UNICEF communications, with postings in Liberia, Pakistan, India, China, and New York, and a stint running UNICEF's Africa media hub in Johannesburg.

The idea for Mobility for Africa grew out of her early development work in rural Zambia, watching women walk hours of dirt road carrying water, goods, and children, with no support and no alternative. In 2018 she turned that into a Zimbabwe-based social enterprise built around the Hamba, a rugged electric tricycle designed for unpaved roads, with a bench seat for women in skirts and a cargo bed that can carry 400 kilograms. Just 322 Hambas were in use last year, but the organization also built solar-powered charging hubs where farmers swap and recharge batteries — and the income has let customers build houses and keep their children in school.

Toyota Mobility Foundation joined as a partner in 2019, eventually contributing $840,000 — about 18 percent of what Bloemen's organization spent over five years, the rest covered by grants and $300,000 of her own savings. The contract gave Mobility for Africa ownership of its intellectual property and barred Toyota from sharing it with anyone else. According to the lawsuit, filed last month in Los Angeles federal court, that's exactly what happened: the foundation quietly let a California consulting firm, Exa Innovation Studio, set up a for-profit copycat, Songa Mobility, in Kenya — duplicating MFA's technology without credit, while Toyota scrubbed references to Bloemen's group from its own materials and cut its funding.

The suit alleges breach of contract, fraud, breach of fiduciary duty, and trade secret misappropriation, and seeks damages and an injunction.

Bloemen says, “Women entrepreneurs everywhere get only a fraction of the start-up capital that men do, and in Africa it is harder still, with most impact finance flowing to a handful of markets and a handful of companies, almost all of them led by men, Toyota was happy to learn from our years of work building off-grid rural e-mobility in Zimbabwe. But rather than investing in the African entrepreneurs who built it, they chose to copy, replicate, and control what we created.”

For now, Goliath is keeping its head down: no formal court response yet, just that one word, "investigating" — which reads less like confidence than a company quietly weighing its next move.

Sounds like a story worth following....!