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.
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....!
This is a great story. Kudos to Shantha for tackling such a fundamental issue such as transport in Africa - and all without the backing of a massive international aid machinery.
ReplyDeleteAn interesting and heart-warming story. I wish the Hamba project all the best. I would have expected the NYT to provide a link to the Hamba website. Here it is .
ReplyDeleteIt reminds me a bit of the Africar story, of the late 1980s. The Africar was made from epoxy-coated wood, which was supposed to be grown from sustainably managed forests. Only three vehicles were built. Also UNICEF was approached for funding.
Having read about the Hamba and its competitors, I am struck by how heavily the concept is built on the assumption that aid and a continuous flow of donor funding will solve the problem. The project promises to boost integrated development and presents itself as a contribution to achieving a Sustainable Development Goal, employing the familiar language of the aid sector and clearly seeking donor support.
However, if the objective is to provide rural Africa with access to affordable transport, then the project should be open source. Success should be measured by how widely the Hamba vehicle is produced and sold, regardless of patents or claims of intellectual ownership. One should welcome the vehicle being manufactured and distributed as broadly as possible.
The women and men of Zimbabwe are not primarily concerned with the SDGs; they want affordable, reliable transport. Achieving scale will require a commercially viable and sustainable enterprise that can produce and sell low-cost transport solutions across African markets.