Smart Move award winner, Digital Matatus, creates pan-African blueprint for urban transport

Digital Matatus – IRU’s Smart Move Award winner for ‘best innovation’ – reports on the successes of mobile phone crowdsourcing data to generate transport infrastructure and policy.

The platform has been used to successfully map the Nairobi minibus (matatu) system, sparking similar initiatives across a number of other cities, including Accra, Amman, Cairo, Kampala, Lusaka, Managua and Maputo. The next phase will seek to enhance communication between different cities via the creation of a resource centre.

Digital Matatus received the IRU award in 2015 for creating and implementing an innovative open data collaborative system and substantially improving the quality of Nairobi’s urban bus transport.

In many developing countries, there are no transport authorities and operators run bus systems very informally. This means passengers and services have very little information on routes, stops, fares and schedules.