Olekard on awareness campaign

INNOVATIONS

By John Churu, Gaborone, Botswana

Botswana’s intended public transport integration has come full circle with the proponents of the ambitious project taking the project to the people.

Olekard took to the streets of Gaborone this week to highlight its new public transport card that will take care of fares to be paid by passengers in buses and taxes in and around Gaborone.

This week saw Pule Mmolotsi and his team doing public appearances in earnest as they try to sell the ambitious transport integration project to the people.

As reported earlier on biztechafrica.com; “Mmolotsi is the CEO and founder of Olekard, a company that came up with a plan to introduce prepaid public transport system in Botswana.

In an exclusive interview with biztechafrica.com, Mmolotsi said: “The Olekard prepaid card will be given for free to commuters. What the commuters will have to do is to load money on to the card from selected participating vendors or agents, and presto! Off they go.”

In order to complete the system, transport owners will have to install a device in their buses which will communicate with the card in question. According to the inventor, the device is called a UID device or Unique Identification Device.

The team started with campaigns, punctuated by music and dance, at the Gaborone bus rank where a throng of curious onlookers jostles for first row seats to get to see what Olekard had to offer. People got their details filled on forms as they received free Olekard cards to be used on their test route between Mochudi and Gaborone.

Mmolotsi told biztechafrica that the response was encouraging. “The whole thing is that the public is responding positively as this is a good thing to come up with something that people will readily appreciate.”

He added that the campaign was originally carried through the social media but he explains that “now we are doing it physically”.