On the streets of Cairo, millions bustle to catch rides to their place of work in the morning and home in the afternoon. Personal cars rush past city bus terminals, scooters weave in between microbuses, and white taxis stand out while ride-hailing service vehicles blend in. Beneath the surface of what the untrained eye perceives as chaos, a predictable, reliable, and essential network of public transport pumps life into the arteries of the largest metropolis in the Middle East and Africa. For most of Cairo’s inhabitants, the accessibility and affordability of the city’s underground, public bus system, and more informal modes of transport such as microbuses and minibuses is their ticket to navigating the city’s vast distances. But in spite of this predictability and reliability, few have a bird’s eye view of this vast web — and this is where Egyptian data scientist and entrepreneur Mohamed Hegazy saw a gap in the market. When he read about Digital Matatus, a project mapping Matatus – the public transit system in Nairobi, Kenya – Hegazy asked himself why no one was doing the same in Egypt. Today, six years later, he is…
Transport for Cairo: The Startup Mapping Movement in Egypt and Across Africa
May 23, 2021
