All over the world, women face astonishing numbers of sexual harassment on public transport. In Kenya, this problem affects 88 percent of women. What if we could redesign public transportation to fundamentally improve safety for women and other vulnerable groups? This is the question that social entrepreneur Naomi Mwaura is answering with FLONE Initiative – the organization she founded in 2013. Ashoka’s Josephine Nzerem caught up with Naomi. They spoke of her deep love and appreciation for ‘matatus’ – the minivans of Kenya – and how she is transforming an entire industry from the ground up by putting more women in charge.
Naomi Mwaura, founder of Flone Initiative, is transforming the transport industry in Kenya.
Josephine Nzerem: For those unfamiliar with Kenya’s transportation system, can you explain how matatus is governed?
Naomi Mwaura: In Kenya we have no public transport. Any private person with the right permits can buy and operate a bus, a matatu. The people who operate the vehicle, such as the driver and conductor, are all paid informally. There is no contract or minimum wage. This type of work is crucial because Kenya has a high youth unemployment rate. Public transportation is the only place a young person can go without having to change clothes, without speaking good English, and still go home with $5.
Nzerem: When did you decide that public transport in Kenya needed to be reformed?
Mwaura: When I was growing up, my family ran a matatu in my hometown. It was very colorfully painted and very popular. It made me appreciate the ability of public transportation to create employment opportunities for an entire extended family while providing freedom of mobility.
But when I was in college, I had the horrible experience of being attacked on a bus, which made me think about the general state of public transport in Kenya. I was shocked when I saw a viral video two years later of a woman being physically assaulted on a bus. My college friends and I decided to organize a protest to raise awareness of the issue of women’s safety. Only four of us showed up and we got more media than protesters. Luckily my lawyer friend had the brilliant idea to turn it into a press conference and the Flone Initiative Trust was born.
Nzerem: You’ve come a long way since then. What was the first hole you started closing?
Mwaura: One of the things we struggled with in the beginning was a lack of data. We had had experiences as women using public transport, but we couldn’t find any data to back up our negative experiences. That is why action research and knowledge development is the basis of everything we do. We started tracking incidents, which allowed us to make specific recommendations to the matatu industry. For example, we learned that they could make their bus routes safer for women simply by having predictable routes and schedules. A conversation is now underway about gender and mobility in Kenya and East Africa. And there is also new interest in looking at the travel needs of other vulnerable groups such as people with disabilities or the elderly. We now partner with more than 3,000 matatu operators, more than 100 transport stakeholders (including government agencies and unions), and more than 1,000 female professionals to deliver our interventions.
Nzerem: How did Flone bring this conversation into the mainstream?
Mwaura: The tipping point of our work came when we became a co-host of the #MyDressMyChoice protest in response to three viral videos of women being assaulted and stripped at bus terminals. It was the first time people came up to me and said, “Now I understand what you’re talking about. I didn’t think it was that bad…” Our actions have led to legal reforms that make undressing women punishable by up to 10 years – a crime specific to the public transport industry.
Nzerem: How do you involve women? What role do they play in shaping the transport industry?
Mwaura: Depending on who you ask, female professionals are estimated to make up just seven percent of the public transportation workforce. Our Women in Transport program seeks to attract, retain and advance female professionals in the industry. We offer professional development training, such as driving courses or financial management courses. That way, female drivers can gain the financial muscle needed to move up in the industry. So we need to invest in women throughout the value chain. Let’s get more of them to become manufacturers, mechanics, designers, engineers.
Nzerem: What will change as more women enter the transportation industry? Something surprising in particular?
Mwaura: Interestingly, other vulnerable groups feel more comfortable when women are in charge. According to our research, people with disabilities prefer vehicles driven by a female conductor. They say women tend to take better care of their accessibility aids like canes and wheelchairs. And other women are more likely to entrust their children to women, especially schoolchildren. Other women also join the industry after seeing our members talk about their careers on national TV.
Nzerem: What do you want to achieve today?
Mwaura: We are building a movement of inclusive mobility in Kenya, where we break silos and provide support to the three key stakeholders: practitioners, commuters and government officials. We can’t solve the whole problem alone – we need everyone. Last year, for example, we worked with officials from Machakos province. They independently performed a safety audit of their city’s transport infrastructure and we helped them create a toolbox. By building the capacity of the government in this way, we hope to get to a point where public transport is regulated and managed by the government.
We also do a lot of behavior change because some of the problems we face in public transport are due to culture and socialization. We need to get to a point where people are self-regulating. And this unfortunately takes a bit more time. We achieve this through public awareness campaigns, by engaging religious and cultural leaders and by building capacity for the industry, particularly in casual transport, where there is no standardized training.
Nzerem: What excites you about the future of transport in Kenya?
Mwaura: Something I keep thinking about is the fact that until the 1990s women in Kenya could not open a bank account without the permission of their husband or family. When someone told me that, it seemed completely absurd. So I hope future commuters will look back and say, ‘Hey, there was a time when public transportation wasn’t the best way for women to travel; isn’t that absurd?’ I see a future where public transport is safe, accessible and a great place to work for Kenyans.
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