Welcome onboard the Magic Bus. Next stop: doubling your income.
A ride on the Magic Bus does indeed sound magical. And that’ s why the idea has won USD 1 million in seed capital. The brainchild of four students— Iman Cooper, Sonia Kabra, Wyclife Omondi, and Leslie Ossete from Indiana’ s Earlham College— Magic Bus beat 25,000 startup entries to win the 2016 Hult Prize, which asked students to find a way to double the income of ten million people living in crowded urban spaces by 2022.
Magic Bus piloted their idea in Nairobi, Kenya, a city where 2.5 million people live in slums, and where 70 % of them rely on the bus system to commute. Unfortunately, the bus system is far from reliable. Commuters sometimes wait up to two hours to catch a bus, and even then, they are not guaranteed a seat if it is overcrowded. The fares vary widely from $ 0.50 to $ 1.50 per trip, so commuters never know what they’ ll be charged until they get on the bus.
The unreliable bus system is not only frustrating, it’ s costly.“ The loss of productivity is staggering and a daily wage worker can lose half of their daily income,” Iman Cooper says.
Magic Bus aims to fix this problem using technology. With Magic Bus, riders can pre-book tickets on a bus by sending a text message from their phone. They can also check how far away a bus is and the exact fare, all through SMS. Magic Bus uses existing bus networks and allows mobile payments through the country’ s popular M-PESA system, allowing passengers to get on even if they don’ t have cash on hand.
A nine-week pilot test in June showed promising results. More than 2,000 people used Magic Bus and more than 5,000 tickets were sold on the platform. The team conducted a survey of 1,000 passengers and found that 25 % saved an hour per trip.“ For some workers, this led to increasing their income by $ 1 a day,” Cooper said.
After winning the Hult Prize, Magic Bus has its sights set on expanding across Kenya. In two years, they expect to be fully operating in 11 cities.“ For millions of people, reliable transportation is often the first test toward accessing goods, services, jobs, and education,” Cooper says.“ We shouldn’ t overlook improving transportation because it can have meaningful impact on society.”
Watch event trailer here: http:// bit. ly / 2fnyZYu
Watch the Magic Bus presentation here: http:// bit. ly / 2efpuVm
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