A little over a year after its debut, local taxi app Khwela has gained a strong following, counting more than 3 000 people as its active customer-base.
Khwela was started out of a need to allow commuters to access information at their fingertips to make travelling by taxi efficient, safe and convenient, says app creator Skhona Khumalo.
“We’ve had a very good reception. Amazon Global has written a case study on Khwela and its impact on South Africans and digitising previously undigitised spaces.”
He adds: “We’ve dealt with a number of client queries, relating to incidents in the taxi spaces, relating to incidents with drivers, vehicles and all sorts of things that take place on a daily in the industry.
“Three thousand is a fair number of people to have on a platform one year-in without any formal advertising.”
A finance graduate, Khumalo founded Geniusynergy, which he says is incubated at the Innovation Hub. It is through this incubation that Khwela was developed and got its start.
Khwela was conceptualised with the direct goal to introduce fourth industrial revolution (4IR) technologies into the everyday lives of South Africans, says Khumalo. “It is a bold statement to make; however, we see how the world is moving faster than we thought it would and it is impacting a whole lot of people who are not part of this 4IR movement.”
“Once you download the app, you login to your account. The app will show you where you are. You type into the search engine your preferred destination and Khwela will provide you with options of the nearest route and taxi rank available to you based on your geographical location, including the cost price for your trip.”
Talking about who can access the app, the entrepreneur explains: “When we started, we realised that we wanted to use Gauteng as a live case study of people actually using Khwela.
“We’ve got rights in Durban, Bloemfontein, Polokwane and we are now, with these collaborations, starting to expand in those areas. If you have downloaded the app, you will see there is minimal representation in those other provinces.
“I’ll say, we’ve got about three provinces to go and then we’ll be all over South Africa. We are expanding the offering in all those different provinces; however, we are already supplying traffic notifications, strike alerts and accidents awareness in all nine provinces currently.”
Khumalo concluded by saying his company is in talks with Primedia and local food retailer, Shoprite, to boost their user numbers. “We want to see 100 000 or 200 000 people using the Khwela app soon.”
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