Why We Built Naulicare: East Africa's Fare Problem
In May 2026, Kenya's government directed the Ministry of Transport and the NTSA to draft a minimum fare framework for ride-hailing apps. Industry consultations floated a minimum of KSh 400–500 — roughly double the prevailing floor of around KSh 220. The intent was to protect driver earnings. The commuter response was not what you'd call enthusiastic.
Riders are already telling us what they'll do
A TIFA survey published in August 2026 found that 44% of Nairobi commuters said they'd shift to matatus more often if ride-hailing prices rose, and as many as 60% said they'd move to cheaper alternatives altogether — matatus, boda bodas, or simply walking. Tanzania, meanwhile, restructured fares across long-distance buses, daladalas, ride-hailing taxis and motorcycle taxis in a similar push earlier in the year.
The pattern across the region is consistent: regulators are trying to set a fairer floor for drivers, and a meaningful share of riders are responding by looking for a cheaper alternative — often an informal one.
The informal alternative already has a model. It's just stuck offline.
Flag down a boda in Kampala or Dar and the transaction is simple: you look at the vehicle, you ask the price, you negotiate, you ride, you pay cash. It's flexible pricing that responds instantly to distance, traffic, time of day and how badly either party wants the trip — the exact thing a fixed per-kilometer algorithm struggles to replicate well. The problem isn't the pricing model. It's that it comes with no trip record, no safety net, no digital payment trail, and no recourse if something goes wrong.
Formal ride-hailing solved the trust and safety problem and then overcorrected by removing the negotiation entirely, replacing it with an opaque algorithm that riders increasingly don't trust to be fair — especially once regulators start publicly debating what the "right" minimum fare even is.
What Naulicare actually does differently
Naulicare keeps the part of the informal market that actually works — negotiation — and gives it the infrastructure formal ride-hailing already has:
- A real request, not a guess. The rider posts where they're going; nearby drivers see the request and respond with their own offer, instead of the rider haggling blind at the roadside.
- Competing offers, visible up front. Multiple drivers can respond to the same request with different prices and ETAs, so the rider is choosing between real offers rather than accepting the first number thrown out.
- Payment held in escrow. The fare doesn't move until the trip is actually completed, which fixes the single biggest trust gap in a cash-negotiated ride.
- Mobile-money payouts drivers already use — M-Pesa, Airtel Money, Mixx by Yas, HaloPesa and MTN MoMo — so getting paid doesn't require adopting a new financial habit.
The bet is simple: a regulator can set a sensible floor for driver earnings, and riders can still get a price that reflects the actual trip — because the fare was agreed by two people, not dictated by a fixed table either side feels stuck with.
Built for the region it's meant to work in
Naulicare spans a passenger app, a driver app and an internal operations dashboard, covering Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi — built on Expo and Supabase, with a double-entry ledger underneath the wallet so every shilling moved is actually accounted for, not just displayed. It's still an active build, not a finished product, but the core negotiation loop — request, offer, accept, ride, release payment — is live and working end-to-end.
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