Vending Tricycle - CooP Uganda

Our Project 

CooP-Africa is a Dutch non-profit organisation that operates in East Africa in Uganda and Kenya. The name CooP stands for Cycling out of Poverty. It’s main objective is to improve income, education and healthcare by providing bicycles and supporting social bicycle enterprises. That being said, we can call CooP a social enterprise with social entrepreneurs (Dees, 1997). CooP adopts the mission to create a sustainable and social value and keeps starting new opportunities to achieve it’s mission.

CooP-Africa has two divisions, one in Kisumu, Kenya and one in Jinja, Uganda. This project of the vending e-tricycle is supported by CooP-Uganda and will be carried out in Jinja, an industrial city in the south of Uganda on the banks of Lake Victoria. It’s the third biggest city of Uganda.

In this project supported by CooP-Uganda, a pilot of a vending e-tricycle will be developed to sell products or services on the street of Jinja. The goal is to have a e-tricycle riding around the streets that sells product or services. The big advantage of using a e-tricycle to vend products over regular street vendor that have small shops on the street or vendors who walk around, is that bigger distances can be covered by bike, making the range of the vended products or services bigger. Because the e-tricycle is electrically driven, the physical pressure is not that big. This makes it possible to transport products over a big area that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. Also, the municipality of Jinja has banned all street vendors to the market halls (Nakato, 2016), making the e-tricycle a good solution. In comparison to vehicles that drive on gas, the e-tricycle is much more ecological. 

To make sure the vending e-tricycle succeeds, extensive research has to be done on the current market vending situation of Jinja. This is necessary to make sure the appropriate product or service will be vended and that this product is sustainable enough to be vended for a long time. Besides the market research, a business plan has to be written, a marketing plan has to be drafted, the e-tricycle has to be modified so it can vend the chosen product or serves and a vendor has to be hired and trained.

Who are we

This project group consist of Jasper Sauer, Johan van den Heuvel and Anne de Boer. These three students all have a different academic background, Jasper is an architecture student, Johan a student of industrial design and Anne a student of technology, policy and management. Fun fact, the three of us will all turn 22 when we are in Jinja. We look forward to finally get the chance to go to Jinja to execute the project we are preparing so hard here in Delft.