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You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. When Doreen Orishaba helped build Africa's first electric car in 2011, skeptics dismissed it as toys for the Western world. Now she's running dozens of electric buses across Kenya and Rwanda, moving tens of thousands of passengers to work every day.
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Buses are the lifeline in African cities, moving over 60% of the population every single day.
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She breaks down what it actually takes to scale clean transport in Africa without subsidies and why skipping the diesel detour is closer than most people think.
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Africa has already proven that we are able to lead in the electric vehicle mobility. We do not have to follow the path of fossil fuel that we followed before we can actually lead this.
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That's coming up right after a short break. This episode is brought to you by Bombas. Lately, I've been thinking about the small things that make a big difference in my day. You know those upgrades you don't realize you needed until you try them? That's exactly what happened with Bombas. I picked up their women's Pima cotton V neck tee, which is what I own, and now I reach for it constantly, whether I'm recording or just doing school pickup. It works. Dress it up with a blazer, keep it casual with jeans. It's that rare piece that adapts to whatever your day throws at you and their base layers. Just game changing. The underwear and tees are so soft and breathable, you'll wonder why you settled for anything less. Here's the best part. Every purchase means an essential clothing item goes to someone experiencing housing insecurity. One purchase equals one don. They've already given over 150 million items. Ready to upgrade your basics? Head over to bombas.com TTD and use code TTD for 20% off your first purchase. That's B O-M-B-A-S.com TTD code TTD at checkout this episode is brought to you by Duck AI. AI can be incredibly useful, but sometimes it gives me pause to think that my chats might be saved somewhere forever. Between work stuff and embarrassing personal questions. A lot of us share more with AI chatbots than we realize, and information shouldn't come at the cost of your Privacy. That's why DuckDuckGo built Duck AI, so you can chat privately with the same AIs you might already be using, like ChatGPT or Claude, and protect your data from hackers, scammers and data hungry companies. There's no account required. It's completely free. Plus it's from DuckDuckGo, known for protecting your data, not collecting it, so you can chat freely without worrying about your AI conversations getting stored or exploited. If you want to use AI without giving up your privacy, visit Duck AI Talk today. That's Duck AI Talk, a private way to chat with AI from DuckDuckGo, where AI is always optional and private. This episode is brought to you by GrowTherapy. Fresh air longer days, a chance to reset this season, let therapy be part of your spring cleaning. Clearing mental clutter, shaking off stuckness, and building something better. Grow Therapy helps you get there. Therapy can be a space to slow down, reflect and make sense of what you're carrying, whether that's work stress, relationship tension, anxiety, or just that feeling you're stretched too thin. Grow connects you with thousands of independent licensed therapists across the US Offering virtual and in person sessions, including on nights and weekends. Whatever challenges you're facing, Grow Therapy is here to help. Grow accepts over 100 insurance plans, including Medicaid in some states. Sessions average about $21 with insurance and some pay as little as nothing, depending on their plan. Visit growththerapy.comted to get started. That's growththerapy.com Ted availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. And now, our TED Talk of the Day.
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When you sit in your car, or any car, do you ever wonder how many parts that car is made of? Do you also ever wonder what does it really take to put all this together? Anyone? Now let me get to it. How many of you have ever built a car from scratch? Oh, great. Good to see you. Absolutely. And I'm also honored to say that I have an electric one at that. Growing up as a follower of four boys earned me an early ticket to the fascinating world of speed and cars. There's something thrilling, something very powerful about, you know, the vehicles, the elegance of the design, the engineering, putting it all together. But what really excites me the most today is the future of mobility. Electric mobility as fast introduced to the electric world. Electric Vehicle world During my time as a student at Makere University, Kira Motors of Uganda was the very first company on this continent to dream beyond fuel. In 2011, Kira Motors built Africa's very first electric car. And this is at a time when the rest of Africa was not paying any attention whatsoever to the electric vehicle space or even the urgency of of addressing the climate crisis. I was privileged to join this team and we moved on to produce Africa's very first plug in hybrid Electric vehicle. And we also proceeded to build Africa's first solar electric bus prototype. As you can imagine, at that time, we're talking about more than 10 years ago. Some people used to think maybe this electric vehicle stuff, these are toys for the Western world. But for us, we were driven by the vision that Africa should contribute to the future of electric mobility and not just be a consumer. Electric buses are now a very prime opportunity. Buses are the lifeline in African cities, moving over 60% of the population every single day. And public transport in, in most of the regions in Africa, it's led by the private sector. So we have electric mobility startups that are driving really the vision of electric buses. This is happening here in Kenya, in Rwanda, in Nigeria. But at the end of the day, despite all these efforts scaling electric mobility is facing huge challenges. Talk of range anxiety, the high upfront cost of electric vehicles and limited charging infrastructure is really slowing down the adoption of electric mobility. But these challenges are not new. They are the same hindrances that stop the electric vehicle, you know, from growing in the 1890s. However, the Times are different. We cannot afford to wait. The planet is telling us that we need to act really soon. And we are proving that there is a way to overcome these challenges. I am Dorino Erichabel, the managing director of Basigo Rwanda. At Basigo, we provide electric buses as a cost effective alternative to the diesel bus. We started out here in Nairobi in 2022 and we've scaled now in to Rwanda with now a total fleet of 77 buses between both countries. And every single day we are enabling the commute of over 30,000 passengers between both countries. Thank you. We've built this by overcoming some of these challenges. Number one, we are cheaper than diesel. Electricity in both Kenya and Rwanda is locally generated from renewable like hydro and wind. That not only makes electricity much cheaper, but also cleaner because remember, the diesel is all imported here. So electricity is cheaper, it's cleaner and it's more stable. We design for the local needs. Have you ever wondered what kind of specification do we need for the bus to be deployed in any of these markets? We do not make assumptions. We pilot with a small fleet and then scale based on the local needs. We get in and optimize the battery capacities, the suspension systems, the drive systems, and make sure that at the end of the day we are using the real life route data in order to scale. I recall when we were doing the market survey in Rwanda, one of the top questions that we always received was, are you sure your electric bus will Be able to handle Kigali's hills. It's been 18 months now of our operation, and that question is now history. We equip our buses with high torque motors for the steep inclines and regenerative braking for the descent to be able to harvest the energy back into the battery. And then this boosts the efficiency of our buses as well as minimizing the breakwear. One thing that really excites me about our Nairobi fleet is we are locally assembling these electric buses right here. These buses have been built with lots of love and passion. And, you know, local assembly not only helps reduce the cost, but we are enabling to build the critical local manufacturing capacity on the planet while also creating jobs. At the end of the day, it's going to be about, what can we all do together? How do we handle the range anxiety? We are building up charging infrastructure. Let me ask you, what's your dream car? Did you ever think about, oh, now that I'm buying the car, I also need to build a gas station for it? Right. No one ever thinks about that. It should be no different for the electric vehicles. As basigo, we go out and build the charging infrastructure. We have a dedicated charging infrastructure team that identifies and builds out the charging stations. We handle all the permitting, all the compliance requirements so that our partners do not have to do that. And we've built stations in strategically located places right near the bus routes. At our stations, we're able to recharge our buses in about one and a half to two hours, removing this entire burden from the operators. Think about service and maintenance. We take this burden away from the operator as well. You know, new technology can be intimidating, right? Especially when there's no local available capacity to be able to support that. So as basigo, we have set up service centers in both Kenya and Rwanda, fully equipped with trained staff, specialized tools, as well as parts inventory to minimize the downtime of these buses. However, our biggest innovation is in the financing of these buses. We provide the buses through a lease model that we call pay as you drive, taking away the need for the operators to invest heavily at the start. I've seen firsthand the transformation that electric mobility is bringing to Kenya and to Rwanda. The smiles and the awe of the passengers as they experience the basigo bus, A ride so quiet and yet so revolutionary. The relief of the operators being able to scale without being choked by the heavy bank loans. But I'll be honest and say, is it a smooth ride? Perhaps not. We're experiencing different challenges, right? From product iteration to the flooding that we recently faced here in Nairobi, which is a direct threat to our operation because of where our batteries are placed. But then it's a reminder of why we are doing, why we are doing this climate change. And I'll be honest and say at the end of the day, we wouldn't trade these experiences for anything else. It is what's bringing us together as a team. Given where we are, Africa really has the potential to be able to lead in this electric mobility movement across the globe. Think about here in East Africa. Our electricity is over 90% renewable. That means deploying an electric vehicle here has much greater impact than anywhere else in the world. One of our electric buses. Replacing a diesel bus enables the mitigation of up to 50 tons of CO2 every single year. That is five times more than what Tesla is able to mitigate in California. And what is that? Speaking to Africa has already proven that, you know, we are able to lead in the electric vehicle mobility. We do not have to follow the path of fossil fuel that we followed before. We don't have to catch up on the electric vehicle mobility movement. We can actually lead this. So far we have proven that zero carbon transport is possible. It's viable here in Africa. With the greatest environmental impact, with greater social impact and with no government subsidy, Africa definitely has the potential to be able to lead in some of these other sectors that were previously stated to be out of the reach for us. I hope you'll be on board as we make this a reality. Asante.
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That was Doreen Orishaba at the TED Countdown Summit in Nairobi, Kenya in 2025. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more@ted.com curationguidelines and that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact checked by the TED research team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene, Lucy Little and Tansika Songmanivong. This episode was mixed by Lucy Little. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Ballaraizo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. Foreign.
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This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping using self reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks. It doesn't just help buyers find a car they love, it helps schedule a test drive, get pre approved for financing and estimate trade in value. Advanced, intuitive and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One.
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