On my last day in Dar I managed to spare some time to visit some old and new friends.
Firstly was Innocent Kiria from Gardaworld who was in our Fleet Management class at SBS in March this year. Innocent manages a fleet of over 100 vehicles and over 200 motorcycles for Gardaworld operations across Tanzania. While his fleet KPIs have kept improving since the program, he says there are still further performance goals to be expected over the next few months.
Secondly was a visit to an old friend Ezra Mereng whom I first met at Kenya Vehicle Manufacturers several years ago. GF Assemblers is a modern vehicle assembly plant at Kibaha, it was established in 2020 to assemble light and heavy commercial vehicles with a current capacity of 2500 units per annum. Their production has roughly been doubling every year, from about 100 units in the first year to being on track to assemble about 2,800 units in total by the end of this year.
The heavy rains across East Africa are pounding Dar as well, they made it impossible for me to make it to Kariokoo as I had planned to check out various 2W & 3W EV outlets. In fact so heavy was the downpour that a section of the BRT line to the airport got totally flooded like a dam. The resulting gridlock on alternative routes was so bad I had to use a boda boda to get to the airport on time, this is Africa. Still took me an hour as we zigzagged through lanes and lanes of gridlock evening traffic.
Despite this hiccup, I am still very glad about the public transport infrastructure that I saw all across the metropolitan area especially the BRT. That last part requires a separate update just to do justice to the story.