Autosafety Uganda

Picture a typical day in Kampala during rush hour. The thick stench of exhaust emanates from vehicle tailpipes crammed in succession, slowly rising through the air and consuming the city streets. Children are on their way to school- some walking along gridlocked roads, others haphazardly packed upon smoking motorcycles- all navigating through toxic clouds and drawing poison into their lungs with each breath – children are suffocating in a worsening climate emergency. Uganda loses over 31,000 people to air pollution, most children, killing more people than HIV/Aids, malaria, and tuberculosis combined, yet these issues continue to receive vastly more attention and resources. According to an analysis from the Clean Air Fund (CAF), just 1% of global development aid is used to tackle air pollution.

While several factors contribute to Kampala’s poor air quality, unregulated road transport is a leading driver. Approximately 90% of vehicles imported to Africa are old, with the average age in Uganda over 15 years. Poor maintenance practices further compromise inbuilt safety and emission control systems. Despite tending to Uganda's vast majority of vehicles, over 85% of Ugandan mechanics lack the resources and know-how for sustainable vehicle maintenance.

Dirty air isn’t the only problem associated with our transport systems; along comes poor waste management. Lack of standards around automotive waste handling often means toxic substances like used lubricants and battery acids, among others, are dumped or spilt, ultimately ending up in water bodies or absorbed by soils. This further wrecks an economy built almost entirely on agriculture, propels an already chronic pattern of injustice and poverty in Africa, and slows down climate action measures.

Autosafety Uganda is a community-driven initiative spearheaded to invest in clean and inclusive mobility for African communities.  We harness our local knowledge and trusted community relationships to bring comprehensive, data-driven, locally relevant climate and public health solutions. 

We’re taking a bottom-up approach to:

Spearhead research: We’re developing and broadening the data and research available on road transport-related pollutants, air quality and road safety in Uganda. We are collecting data on vehicular emissions to make a data-backed call to action based on how vehicular maintenance and road infrastructure affect local transport emissions.

Increase public visibility and engagement: We’re implementing community education and awareness campaigns, focusing on child transport services, to mobilize local communities around the value of clean air.  The goal is to enable access to and interpretation of available data and, most importantly, to provide actionable and affordable steps to reduce transport-related pollution, supplement existing climate action measures and improve the respiratory health of children and families.

Build capacity and provide technical training: We’re partnering with local mechanics to offer free training, support, and resources around sustainable maintenance and education around computerised diagnostics to facilitate better mechanics’ ability to implement best practices for reducing emissions from vehicles and related equipment. The aim is to enhance and maintain the integrity of inbuilt safety and emissions control systems in automobiles and factories that can capture the most harmful pollutants in the short term. At the same time, we seek to move away from fossil fuels in the medium term.

Promoting transition to electric mobility. In a separate pilot, we seek to accelerate the transition to electric mobility through retrofitting (conversion) on some of the most common vehicles, especially public commuter taxis. This aims to create a circular economy, especially in the informal sector, as Africa is increasingly becoming a dumpsite for used cars, yet most countries lack end-of-life automobile policies.

Influence large-scale policy reform: We’re leveraging our research and community-based partnerships to engage and influence policymakers around clean air and road safety reforms while supporting leaders in taking steps towards introducing meaningful standards and regulations. Makerere University and Uganda's Ministry of works and transport have actively picked interest in the program.

Our solution has a multidimensional impact, but most importantly, it serves as a major supplement to Uganda's climate action measures and is highly replicable in several emerging economies with similar challenges. 

Currently, Uganda doesn't have a mandatory vehicle emissions testing system. As a region, East Africa adopted the Euro 4 vehicle emissions standards that don't necessarily apply because of the data gaps. For instance, it's difficult to say a Euro 4 vehicle will remain with the same standards when, in a few years of operating in Uganda, it no longer has any functional emission controls. The theft of catalytic converters and modification of emission-related systems in vehicles by local mechanics is at a high rate, and courtesy of our solution, the Ministry of Works and Transport has identified our nonprofit as a critical stakeholder in formulating draft regulations around vehicle maintenance in the country.

The emissions data we are collecting will soon foster the development of a vehicular emissions inventory for Uganda, which creates a case for accelerating the implementation of stricter regulations on vehicle importation, operations, and maintenance.  

Our solution further promotes public health, especially among vulnerable groups. One of our key areas of work is engaging schools to devise means of reducing children's exposure to transport-induced pollution while in and out of transit. There are currently no regulations on the issue, and we are pushing for a change. In the same aspect, our engagement with policymakers seeks to cause reforms where automobile repair centres are gazetted; in the current settings, it's common to find a motor repair garage next to a preschool or children's clinic, yet several dangerous activities like excessive engine idling and open-air spray painting happen daily.

As a team at  Wanyama Autosafety Initiatives, we bring expertise and know-how across various disciplines, including automobile mechanics, industrial mechanics, environmental engineering, public health, social work and public administration. Most importantly, we bring the resolve of concerned parents and citizens taking a stand for our children and working to safeguard their future. We’re channelling this energy into strategic action, providing a clear roadmap to reduce transport-related environmental degradation and improve the health and well-being of communities across Uganda and beyond. We see the urgency of this work and its critical place in ensuring a better future for our children, communities, and planet.

We work with communities to see the problem, understand its formation, and take participants on a journey to engage in individual and collective action for mitigation.

We’ve already accomplished a lot to date with few resources; we began the onset by conducting thorough needs assessments, allowing us to gain a better understanding of how local values and behaviours drive current conditions and enable a more targeted and responsive strategy for engagement. We’ve established ourselves as trusted community members, engaging over 2,500 households and building relationships with esteemed council leaders to reach new communities, spread awareness, and encourage positive behaviours around clean air.

We’ve engaged over 1,200 local mechanics through capacity-building workshops that equip them with the skills and essential tools needed to institute new standards and practices around vehicle maintenance. We aim to move away from the makeshift practices that characterize most of these operations to ensure mechanics can understand and take pride in the ins and outs of their trade. We’re gearing up to train up to 20,000 auto-mechanics and engage 100,000 more households in the next 5-7 years, at the same time tackling the gender disparity in the male-dominated sector as we’ve seen women bring unique abilities to any task, but they lack an enabling environment for them to work in Africa’s automobile maintenance industry.

We’re also strengthening partnerships with local entities like Makerere University’s AirQo Project and Uganda’s Ministry of Works and Transport to increase our impact exponentially and promote the transition to clean and safe mobility.

Our idea of making road transport cleaner and safer has already earned us two international awards for innovation in the past year, including one from the International Transport Forum during the 2022 ITF summit in Germany in May 2022 and another from the 2022 World Smart City Awards during the Smart City World Expo Congress in Spain, November 2022. We were the only African initiative that received such recognition amidst stiff competition - concrete proof of the significance of our program toward improving Transport in Africa and a significant contribution to the fight against climate change.

Part of our work, including data collection, has been powered by a grant for a research project from the UK-based High Volume Transport Program with funding from the Foreign Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO).

Through Solve's network potential, we hope to refine our idea for clean mobility in Africa and prepare it for scale-up beyond Uganda through our connections with other teams. As a literally new concept being implemented, visibility is key to potential support.

As a team, we need to acquire more skills in project management, monitoring and evaluation as well as strategy improvement that partners may have to offer. It's also an opportunity for other teams to learn from us, thereby scaling our impact.

Our solution is the first in Africa to consider augmented automobile maintenance as a key to decarbonising transport while minimising the risk accompanying the millions of old vehicles dumped in Africa within the next few years. Retrofits will fix one at a time.

Several factors affect youth unemployment in Uganda, including poor access to quality education and training, a skills gap between job seekers and open positions, a shortage of formal jobs relative to the number of young people entering the labour force, and the dominance of the informal sector.

In the Kampala metropolitan alone, there are over 50,000 mechanics aged between 16 and 35, and around 70% of them are working in makeshift settings because they lack skills, knowledge and appropriate tools, earning little while compromising emission control systems and increasing the risk of air pollution exposure to themselves and the people around them. Most automobile repair garages are situated amidst human settlements in poor urban communities. These low-income groups tend to be more exposed to air pollution because they are more likely to depend on jobs that require outdoor physical labour; most businesses around them, including garages, are pollution factors through activities like open-air auto-body spray painting, excessive idling; and when affected by pollution-related diseases, they tend to have more limited access to adequate and affordable health care, increasing mortality rates and worsening the climate emergency.

Through our solution, young people are learning new skills and better ways of running errands, which partially translates to the ability to seek and handle better-paying jobs. They also learn to be accountable and responsible for environmental health, and several pledge to refrain from malicious acts like the theft of catalytic converters, which helps avoid tailpipe emissions to a reasonable level.

The engagement of policymakers with collected and analysed emissions data is to contribute to reforming policies and regulations, like the monitoring and regulation of the vehicle maintenance structure in the country and the age limit of vehicle imports, among others.

We are already working on collaborating with the Ministry of Education under the Directorate of Industrial Training (DIT) to facilitate government accreditation of technicians we train since the government is already in the early stages of regulating motor repair garages - another program we happily participated in during the formulation process owing to our extensive understanding of transport in the informal sector. 

At scale, the electric vehicle retrofitting part of our initiative will fetch some revenue when we start retrofitting vehicles at affordable rates since the affordability of a new vehicle is hard for over 80% of Ugandans. A few other related technical, profitable services will be introduced for the initiative's sustainability.

We seek to replicate and scale our solution to other countries in the global south, starting with Kenya, where several positively perceived presentations have been made at international agencies like the World Resources Institute (WRI - Africa)

Once scaled, there might be an opportunity to establish a clearer estimate or quantification of Africa's contribution towards global transport emissions; when our inventory covers a few thousand vehicle units.

Tailpipe emissions data is collected using a combination of manual/physical inspections, electronic means using onboard testing with a portable exhaust 5-gas analyser or Portable Emissions Measurement Systems (PEMS) for unburned Hydrocarbons (HC), Carbon Monoxide (CO), Oxides of Nitrogen (NOx), Oxygen (O2) and Carbon Dioxide CO2); plus, vehicle On-board Diagnostics version two (OBD-II) to access data from the engine control units (ECU).  Most test results or observations are recorded manually to collect specific information and input it into a computer database.

Before and after service, exhaust or tailpipe emission analyses are done on select vehicles, including 3-axle goods vehicles, light passenger vehicles and motorcycles operating primarily around Kampala. Physical inspections of inbuild emission controls were carried out; furthermore, vehicles with electronic systems based on 12-Volt DC power receive further testing by checking for emissions-related failures logged in the engine control units.

The vehicles are then installed with GPS trackers to enable the collection of more information for the final analysis to tell the difference between the emission levels of 2 vehicles of the exact technical specifications but operating under separate road conditions (paved or unpaved).