Everything we do is because we believe every person deserves access to economic opportunities . We do this by providing dignified and reliable transportation services to increase certainty and convenience. We just happen to be an offline app for commuters to book public bus tickets. We are finalists in the Hult Prize competition, sponsored by President Bill Clinton. With only $10k Magic Bus developed an MVP and tested the tech with more than 3,000 tickets booked and 1,800 users.
Everything we do is because we believe every person deserves access to economic opportunities .
We do this by providing dignified and reliable transportation services to increase certainty and convenience.
We just happen to be an offline app for commuters to book public bus tickets.
As finalists in the world’s largest business competition, the Hult Prize (www.hultprizesix.com) we are competing for $1M to start a social enterprise to double the income of 1M people in crowded urban spaces. We are among 6 finalist teams selected from 25,000 applicants to present at the Clinton Global Initiative, among the likes of President Bill Clinton, Dr. Muhammad Yunus, and Mo Ibrahim.
We are a team of recent graduates from Earlham College, three girls and one guy, from Kenya, the US, India, and Congo who collectively have lived and worked in more than 16 countries. We are a team of creators, passionate about finding innovative solutions global challenges. Between the four of us we have founded a business, a NGO, worked with exposing girls to STEM careers, taught entrepreneurship to rural women, founded a literacy program, educated students about menstrual bullying, and have now become one of six global finalists. We are a team that preserves despite all odds. We lost during the campus round at Earlham, reworked our idea and reapplied directly to Hult Prize. We don’t quit, we will work to ensure that all people can access economic opportunities through optimizing transport across emerging markets.
With only $10k we have developed the MVP of our our offline app and done the first round of beta testing on one route in Nairobi. With more than 3,000 booked bus tickets and more than 1,800 users now it’s time to expand our service to 20 buses, to validate our impact and gain user adoption. Help us win the Hult Prize finals in September by funding our second pilot phase!
Our main bottleneck is the number of tablets we can purchase. The more money we have, the quicker we can implement with the 110 buses requesting our services, who are currently on our wait list. The more buses we have, the more convenient it is for riders to use our system, meaning the more user adoption we can have!
Every $100 buys an Android tablet so that we can service another bus, allowing us to optimize transportation for more 600 commuters per day.
Every $500 supports the tech cost of more than 3,000 bus tickets to be booked through our system
Every $1,000 is used for a week’s salary and transportation for our staff of20 volunteers to train bus crews, sell to commuters, and measure impact
Milestones
We will directly be doubling the income of 1M bus driver crews across Africa, by increasing the number of trips they can make each day by making the transportation system more efficient, Magic Bus is created to have impact on everyone using the system, from the drivers to the riders, to urban planners.
Commuters will no longer have to wait long periods of times to get their buses, they can conveniently book their tickets through SMS , allowing them to better plan their day and access better services like jobs, education, and healthcare currently out of their reach. The majority of us now accept Uber and Lyft as easy and convenient ways to get around cities, but for underserved markets these technologies exclusively rely on the use of smartphones.
We are the first tech for transport solution to specifically target low income markets, to provide them with dignified and reliable transport through SMS–which means we can change the world of the 200M people relying on informal transport systems!
By making transportation more affordable and predictable, we will also incentivize people who currently walk to take public buses, decreasing congestion in the long term and creating sustainability in cities.
That’s all there is to it!