Founded in 2015 in Kampala, Uganda to bring innovation, safety, and community to the rapidly growing motorcycle taxi industry in Africa, Motorbike hailing app Safeboda will no longer be available in Kenya after the startup announced an indefinite termination of operations in the market effective 27th November 2020.
This was a hard decision for us to make but we are still dedicated to empowering communities. Thank you for being a part of the #NduthiGang. We love you🧡 pic.twitter.com/AsuB5j6tWn
— SafeBoda Kenya (@SafeBoda_Kenya) November 16, 2020
The Motorcycle ride-hailing firm has cited an unsustainable business environment due to the mass effects left behind in the wake of the novel Coronavirus.
The Kampala-based start-up with a market presence in Nigeria and Uganda pauses its operations just 4 years after its launch in 2017.
The motorcycle ride company had just flagged off its 25,000th rider in Nairobi as the company clocked 100,000 safe rides daily earlier this year before, sadly, things went downhill.
Safeboda users were recently facing difficulty travelling in Nairobi following a ‘blackout, by the app’s riders.
The riders had been cancelling requests for the past two months to protest the low pricing of the rides which they felt was eating into most of their profits.
“With prices slashed by over 40 percent you can now get around Nairobi with SafeBoda for as little as 60 bob!!” read a post on the firm’s app.
The riders argued that the offers were making business hard for them as they get low returns at a time when life was already hard.
