For a farmer in rural Rwanda, delivering food to a market often involves loading hundreds of pounds of potatoes or bananas on a bike and pedaling over steep hills in hot weather. Large farms might be able to afford to make deliveries in a diesel truck, but because most of the trucks are at the end of their life—discarded from other countries—they often break down on rough dirt roads. The inefficient system means that farmers make less money, and food is often wasted. A farmer loads a tomato crop onto his bicycle in Kajevuba, Bugesera, Rwanda, in 2018. [Photo: Camille Delbos/Art in All of Us/Corbis/Getty Images] But some farmers are now able to book space on a new electric truck instead. A startup called Ox Delivers, based in the U.K. and Rwanda, is growing a fleet of EVs that are custom-designed for the African market. “An EV is actually perfect for Africa because they are super cheap to operate and maintain,” says Ox Delivers founder and CEO Simon Davis. “That makes them a great fit with a service business model. What we’ve done is develop the first purpose-designed electric truck for Africa.” The first version of the vehicle, funded by a philanthropist in 2016, ran on diesel, but the team later shifted to an electric model. (The startup launched later, in 2020, to bring the concept to market.) The truck has a flat-pack design so that components can be made in the U.K. and then shipped to Rwanda for assembly. Critical safety steps, like making the electrical connections, are put in place before the kit ships. It’s rugged enough to travel over unpaved roads in bad weather, carrying as much as 2 tons of cargo on 100-mile routes. At night, the trucks plug in to recharge. A new grant, from the U.K.’s Energy Catalyst, will help the startup build more charging infrastructure. [Photo: Ox Delivers] Because farmers and other small businesses in Rwanda can’t afford to buy trucks themselves, Ox Delivers provides a service instead. Customers book space on the truck through an app or a phone call, and pay roughly the same amount it would cost to make a delivery by bike. The company has been testing the pay-as-you-go service with used diesel trucks first, with a fleet of nearly 30 vehicles. So far, Ox has three of its own electric trucks on the road, and plans to grow the fleet of EVs to 100 by the end of next year as it phases out the diesel trucks. Since the startup owns its trucks, it’s incentivized to make them as durable and easy to repair as possible. “As an operating company, we want the trucks to last forever,” Davis says. “We have no interest in trucks coming off the road, which is obviously completely different from your average vehicle manufacturer, whose objective ultimately is to sell as many vehicles as possible.” The design means that some parts, like the lightweight plywood doors, can be made locally in Africa if they need to be replaced. [Photo: Ox Delivers] For customers, the delivery service can transform how they work. For the owner of one small store, for example, restocking bananas used to take as long as a few days. She’d take a bus to a banana plantation, and then sit on the side of the road waiting for a truck or another bus to come by with room to carry a load of fruit. While she waited, she lost income because her store was closed. It wasn’t safe to sleep overnight by the road. And the longer the wait, the more likely the fruit would go bad. Now she no longer has to make the trip. Davis says that some clients who previously made two bike deliveries of potatoes per week now deliver two truckloads, helping their income grow tenfold. With more predictable transportation, other workers can change their schedules; fishermen, for example, used to wait to start fishing until a truck arrived, because if the fish were to sit outside too long in the sun, they would go bad. Now they can fish longer and catch more. Fast, cheap transportation can also help reduce the cost of food in markets when it’s coming from remote areas. “You have this problem where the farmers complain they don’t earn any money, prices are super low, and then people in the cities are paying super high prices,” Davis says. “And the reason is there isn’t transport in between.” There’s a huge demand for the service to grow in Rwanda, where there are 13 million people and only around 15,000 trucks. And it’s something that Ox Delivers aims to replicate across Africa and other parts of the Global South.

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