Regional Review > Middle East & Africa > 

Strategy and Governance

Addressing Mobility and Community Challenges in Africa

Ford Project Better World

Since 2015 through our Ford Project Better World, we have been building partnerships to address a range of mobility and community challenges. Our partners include Riders for Health, an international nonprofit medical transportation organization, and World Vision, an international children’s charity.

In South Africa, we are working with World Vision to improve access to quality health care in the Eastern Cape. There is a desperate need for basic health care and education in the Eastern Cape, particularly in the impoverished and remote rural areas. We donated two Ford Ranger pickup trucks, which have been specially modified as mobile clinics, to support health education, access to medication and child nutrition.

In Nigeria, Riders for Health placed two flexible response vehicles (FRVs), also Ford Rangers, in communities around Abuja in late 2016.

Innovate Mobility Challenge Series – Morocco

Taxi sharing has a long history in Morocco and in many countries in the Middle East and North Africa. In Rabat and Casablanca, taxicabs frequently stop to pick up additional passengers and often won’t start their journeys again until the cab is full of passengers – even if there are passengers waiting in the back seat.

Ford launched the Code4TaxiCabs Mobility App Challenge in 2016, tasking app developers around the world to help improve Morocco’s taxi-sharing culture by creating solutions that focus on making shared rides faster, safer and more cost- and time-efficient for taxi drivers and their passengers. The app challenge also had a special category looking at a feature that could address safety for female passengers by offering a way to ride with other women.

The survey that was conducted after the program saw 92 percent of respondents acknowledging the benefit of the program to address market-specific mobility concerns.

The Code4TaxiCabs Mobility App Challenge is part of Ford’s Innovate Mobility Challenge Series. This series began in 2014, with 10 cities around the world, and continued through 2015 to 2017.

Ethics, Trust and Transparency

In South Africa, Ford earned an Exporter of the Year merit award for the Best Exporter OEM, an Environmental merit award for the fourth consecutive year, and was named the winner of the Industrial Development Corporation Job Creation merit award.