There is a new face in Kigali’s public transport and its leadership. Just earlier last month, Doreen Orishaba was appointed Managing Director of BasiGo Rwanda, an electric mobility company that provides electric buses as a competitive alternative to diesel buses.

She joined the company in January 2022, in Nairobi, where, with two buses, she led the pilot project throughout the first six months of passenger operations.

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"Those two buses were the very first buses to go into passenger operations. And based on the different lessons that we learned, we were able to know how to plan for a larger scale. That expertise that we developed over two years now, is what has helped us also expand into Rwanda,” she explained.

Her journey

This year’s International Women’s Day (IWD) campaign theme is "Inspire Inclusion”, from which Orishaba draws on her experience, having been mentored by both women and men. In the pursuit of equality, she believes that men are also integral to the journey.

Orishaba’s journey into the automotive space began over a decade ago when Kiira Motors, in Uganda, began developing the first electric vehicle in Africa. She was part of the vehicle design and development team. It also helped that her older brothers introduced her to vehicles at an early age.

A fresh graduate in electrical engineering from Makerere University, she was picked up and guided by one of her lecturers at the university who opened the door to Kiira Motors.

Although the company offered different training sessions, electric vehicles in Africa had not yet become a subject of attention, and there was no course in automotive engineering. And so the team, she recalls, had to learn different special systems about the electric vehicles such as what it takes to build one, and what it takes to plan for an electric bus because there they built the very first solar electric bus.

"When we started there wasn’t really that much money involved in what we were doing. But we were passionate, we were really driven. And while we were doing this, the very first team was doing this outside their university hours. It was like a co-curricular activity, and look at where it has gotten us. Sometimes you just have to be passionate enough to go and look for that challenge. Go and do it. Find something different from the norm, like step out of your comfort zone and do not say no to an opportunity when it shows up,” she said.

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Orishaba emphasised the need for women who have risen through the ranks to take the initiative to mentor younger girls, and for the latter to take the initiative to learn the ropes of the areas they are interested in.

"I always believe it’s going to start with our roots. Some of these positions where we need to include people, require qualifications. If the girl child has not been exposed from a tender age, and they are requiring, let’s say, someone with an engineering background, or a software development background, or if you do not have exposure to that, you’re probably never going to qualify.

"We’ll always keep on shouting, that we need inclusivity, but we also need a basis for that. So really, we need to reach out to the girl child from a tender age, introduce them to things like Lego programmes, coding, introduce them specifically to STEM subjects, and build their interest at an early age,” she added.

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The other element, she added, is reminding the men that they’re also a part of the journey and that we can all be contributors, and in a way that creates impact, not just what helps us in our careers, but also within our communities and the world.

"It’s one thing to teach the girls, but then we also need to remember the men, they are the fathers to the girls, they are the brothers, they are the uncles, and they are the husbands. They also need to be empowered in a way that they can uplift the girl child, build confidence in their wives, in their sisters, in their daughters, to know that we can achieve so much,” she said.

Electrifying public transport in East Africa

Over the years, as she explained, Orishaba has grown to be passionate about providing affordable and accessible electric transport in East Africa, where public transport is led by the private sector. With BasiGo’s success in the pilot phase in Nairobi, the next best city was Kigali.

"The private business person is always looking for where they can maximise revenue and also optimise in terms of costs. That means, for us to be able to successfully electrify the public transport sector in East Africa, we have to speak to the providers of public transport.

"And looking at a city like Kigali, we pride ourselves in being a clean city, in being the leader in electrification because of the enabling environment that the government has set up. For example, electric vehicles currently are tax-exempt. There’s also a great electricity tariff that has been set up for e-mobility. So, the next thing is how do we make the buses available? How do we make them affordable? How do we make the Rwandans, who deserve clean means of transport, be able to access these buses?” Orishaba explained.

To prove that, they started with four buses to be comfortable with the specification of the motor, the battery of the entire bus, and how it is going to operate.

"We are in a very comfortable position right now, where we are beginning to plan for 100 buses within the next 12 months. And the target is going to be 200 buses within the next two years,” she said.