The British-born businesswoman behind Ghana’s first electric bike is out to woo Africa’s delivery riders away from costly and polluting petrol while cutting carbon emissions
Tue 30 Jul 2024 14.00 BSTShare
Valerie Labi, co-founder and chief executive of Wahu Mobility, enjoys a challenge. “If I see a problem and I think it can be solved, I follow that thread,” she says.
The latest problem for Labi, whose company has produced Ghana’s first electric bicycle, is trying to persuade the country’s delivery riders to swap their ageing petrol motorcycles for herWahu ebikes.
The idea for Wahu, which means “horse” in the Dagbani language of northern Ghana, came to her when she moved to the region’s capital, Tamale, in 2015, and heard neighbours complain about how expensive and unreliable transport was.
Looking at ways to overcome this, Labi began buying secondhand push bikes during the pandemic in 2020 and turning them into ebikes by adding conversion kits bought from Amazon.
Four years later, the company has now designed and developed its own licensed ebike and technology platform for delivery riders, opened an assembly plant in Ghana’s capital, Accra, and is about to close on an $8m investment round.
There are now 300 delivery riders using Wahu ebikes in Accra, as the company looks to take advantage of Africa’s growing “last mile delivery” market – the final link in the supply chain to customers – a sector that is set to be worth $2.3bn by 2030. A further 2,000 users are expected to join within the next year. Labi has plans to eventually produce 50,000 Wahu ebikes a year and to introduce them across Africa, making huge carbon reductions in the process.
“The average age of a vehicle in Ghana is 14 years,” she says. “We know there are going to be a lot of Amazon-type businesses needing last-mile mobility – do we really want them to be 14-year-old petrol vehicles?”
The serene surroundings of the Landmark hotel in London’s Marylebone are a far cry from the hectic roads of central Accra. But Labi, who is in the UK as part of a trade mission to promote investment in Ghana’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) sector, talks enthusiastically about how the Wahu model works.
Riders buy the bikes under a payment plan of between 18 and 24 months, working out at up to $25 a week. Once on board, they are automatically put on Wahu’s fleet platform, which has partnerships with companies such as Bolt, so they have a consistent pipeline of work. Wahu ebikes are also cheap to run, costing just $13.60 a month to power, compared with $250 for a petrol vehicle.
Alongside the physical ebikes, Wahu has also developed a technology platform. This not only tracks the bikes – no Wahu has been stolen yet – but measures carbon savings from journeys, which can then be packaged and turned into carbon credits.
Its app also gives riders a safety score, with Wahu able to remotely shut down a bike if a user is deemed to be riding too dangerously.
Some may see this level of monitoring and control as an overreach by the company, but Labi says the data is essential to making the product affordable.
“It comes back to risk – things in our [Ghanaian] market are expensive because there’s no data,” she says. “Giving digital footprints opens people up to more affordable rates. That is why we can offer cheaper insurance – that is why we can offer them payment plans.”
Labi was born and brought up in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, by Ghanaian parents who came to the UK for work in the 1970s.
However, despite having lived for most of the past 15 years in Ghana, she didn’t visit the country until she was 14. “You only really got sent to Ghana if you were badly behaved,” she jokes.
There was little chance of this happening to Labi. Head girl at Queenswood school in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, she then studied economics at Southampton University, where she began an internship at accounting firm EY and was subsequently hired.
She initially envisioned a career in finance for herself, until the global crash of 2008. During this period, she saw colleagues who had invested huge amounts in shares in failed banks lose everything. It proved a defining moment for her.
Disillusioned, she visited Ghana for Christmas in 2008 and didn’t return to the UK for another six years.
Labi, who describes herself as a serial impact entrepreneur, has since headed several social enterprises across Ghana, enterprises that tackled some of the country’s biggest challenges.
This includes a period at Global Mamas, an organisation that provided financial training and business support for more than 300 female-led SMEs in the country.
She also founded Sama Sama, a Tamale-based sanitisation social enterprise providing low-income families the opportunity to buy toilets on an affordable payment plan. It operates across eight regions in Ghana and has served more than 100,000 people.
Meanwhile, running Wahu Mobility, which she officially launched in 2022 alongside co-founder Toni Heigl, has not come without its own difficulties, which included being heavily pregnant during her initial talks with investors.
Labi, who has three children, says that trying to raise funds while expecting was a challenge and made her question whether people would invest.
However, she believes the Ghanaian culture is a lot more conducive to helping mothers succeed in business, with family and extended family often willing to look after children.
“If you look at those leading Ghana’s banks, or those heading telecoms companies, many are women who have children,” she adds.
Wahu is about to complete on the $8m it has targeted for its first round of funding, with the money to be channelled into delivering more of the bikes at its assembly plant, which opened in February.
After a series of prototypes, the company has landed on a bike with front and back suspension so it can withstand Ghana’s potholes, as well as a thumb throttle to ensure quick acceleration at its busy junctions – something Labi says is essential in the country.
It also includes two batteries with a combined range of 87 miles (140km) that can be recharged at home and do not require expensive charging infrastructure.
Labi believes that this vehicle design, made with African conditions in mind, could set it apart from the cheaper ebikes being imported into the continent, and prove popular with delivery riders in other African countries. Wahu has already begun trialling ebikes in Lomé, the capital of neighbouring Togo, and is also targeting Zambia, Senegal, Morocco and Nigeria.
It similarly has sights on becoming the first company to develop Ghana’s first four-wheel electric vehicle, with the business set to unveil its first four-wheeler for Africa in the coming months.
But whether two-wheelers or four-wheelers, it is clear that Labi thinks the model works, and the benefits for Africa’s environment and economy could be huge too.
Problem-solver Labi wants to be front and centre of the solution. “Our strategy is to become the sustainable fleet of Africa,” she says.
CV
Age 38
Family Husband and three children, aged 9, 4 and 2
Education University of Southampton BSc in Economics, Masters in Sustainability Leadership at Cambridge University
Pay Seeing my riders make money and go green
Last holiday Zambia, Angels Pool and Victoria Falls
Best advice she’s been given “Grow and Be Yourself”
Biggest career mistake Balancing bikes and babies ….the journey of building a start up through pandemics and pregnancies is not for the faint hearted.
Phrase she overuses Can I get a Wahu?!
How she relaxes: Laughing and chilling with family
