African Drive

Economic & social impact in countries with poor global infrastructure

After successfully starting a bus transport company in Benin called Baobab Express, providing cheap and reliable transportation as well as jobs to more than 200 people locally, they wanted to take things further and start solving some of the energy issues.

Product Management Recruiting CTO as a Service Audits & Tech Due Diligence

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Overview

Baobab Express is building up an ecosystem of energy solutions based around a self-developed rechargeable battery capable of powering everything from electric motorbikes to household devices. The first step, after developing the battery, is to run a pilot using the battery in off-the-shelf electric motorcycles and scooters. This is where African Drive came to life.

Project Stage

When we started working with them, the project wasn't much more than an idea. First sketches of the hardware were being discussed. We were asked to help out with the client and internal user facing software.

After more than two years of development, together with other partners, we're now running a first pilot in Benin with motorcycles. Meanwhile we are helping them with recruiting a local team to take over development and maintenance from us.

Initial Goals

Our first contact with the client was to audit the work a Beninese development agency did for Baobab Express. After that, talks quickly moved to supporting the Baobab Energie project as well.

The initial question was for us to help with the design of the whole ecosystem of apps surrounding the batteries: the mobile app for end-users, a mobile-first web app for the people managing the points-of-sale and recharging station, and a web admin for the support and management team.

The end goal is for a local team to further develop and maintain the different applications, so madewithlove was asked to help find that local team and mentor them.

Services We Offered

We started with an audit of the work done by a local development agency for Baobab Express.

Because we were involved so early on in the project we were able to make sure the right features were built by helping out with product management. Designing and developing an application for a market like Benin is never easy. The patterns we know, the experience we assume of our user, the hardware and network availability we consider transparent — all of these had to be reconsidered. Take for example the expectations around payments. A subscription model, which is the default for these kinds of products in rich countries, does not work for Benin. We helped shape the business model, also taking into account what is technically feasible, and came up with a minimal solution for the pilot.

For the charging and sales point, we developed a mobile-first web app. The people working for Baobab Energie are able to identify users and batteries through QR-codes, and keep track of inventory. Using Laravel Nova, we also developed an admin tool that allows more extensive administration of the batteries, including managing stock, battery usage details, administration and payment details, and user management.

The main interaction point for end-users is an Android app, built using Flutter. We opted for this technology for several reasons: it's easy to take over by local engineers, and it is fully featured and clearly documented. The result was an Android-only app — Apple products are far too expensive for the local market — that allows users to see the charge of the batteries they have, get information on how to work with the battery and motorcycle, identify themselves at a charging station, and see accounting details.

To communicate with the batteries in the field, each equipped with a cell phone data connection, we built on top of AWS's IoT platform. This solves most of the issues we could have due to uncertain data connections and infrequent data updates by the batteries. We then built our own back-end to connect the AWS services with the admin and mobile apps.

Our Exit Plan

We developed our part of the ecosystem alongside the hardware development, which took almost 2 years in total.

The end goal of training a local team to take over is still on the table. While the pilot is running, the team is also recruiting a development team. We will continue to be involved until the team can take over, providing assessment and training, along with advice on team and product management.