Neither Rain Nor Snow Nor Lack Of Address Will Stop These Deliverymen
Finding people's homes in Nigeria is a nightmare.
Zip codes don't exist. House numbers are random. In poorer areas of the city, there's no such thing as urban planning. Houses are built wherever people can find a plot of land, for example. And many parts of the city aren't mapped out on GPS. Then of course, there's the traffic.
So imagine how tough it must be to be a delivery person for one of the country's new e-commerce websites. A customer might order, say, a supply of diapers. Delivery might be promised within 3 days. Only the diapers arrive a day late — because the couriers simply couldn't locate her house.
That's a story that Adetayo Bamiduro and Chinedu Azodoh, two Nigerian tech entrepreneurs who met at MIT, have heard many times before in a dozen different ways. Like many of their peers in Lagos' booming tech scene, Bamiduro, 32, and Azodoh, 26, wanted to use technology to not only fix the problem but address social issues in Nigeria — specifically its high youth unemployment rate.
And that's how Metro Africa Xpress was born. The app connects motorcycle drivers to Nigerian e-commerce companies to deliver goods to customers in less than 3 hours — a time frame unheard of before then. In the process, they hope to create a skilled, forward-thinking labor force.
Read the full story here.