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.