AGES interview at Enlit Africa 2025 with: Amiene van der Merwe, Managing Director, The Green Cab.
Q: Amiene, tell us about your company.
I’d love to. As you can see the name is The Green Cab. We founded it quite a while ago, more than a decade ago already, because we knew that transport is where the rubber hits the road, so to speak, in terms of the climate crisis and that’s how we can drive down emissions.
So we’re doing it one electric green cab at a time, and we’re also seizing the climate crisis, the rise in electric mobility and the sad scourge of gender-based violence in South Africa, to get young women in the driving seat, so they have dignified livelihood opportunities, like my colleagues here, Monique and Zizo.
They are part of a micro mobility project in The Waterfront: free continuous shuttling. They have drivers licences and motorbike licences, so they operate electric three-wheelers for us. And our ambition is to also launch a fully-fledged cab division, 230 vehicles over the next five years, and owened and operated by women, linked into corporate service opportunities.
Q: Are you fully funded?
Oh no! [laughs] What kind of a question is that to an SMME? We’ve been blessed recently with the Uyilo Kickstart Fund, because we’re driving awareness about electric mobility and adoption in The Waterfront, which is such a premier tourist destination, and we’ve got some advanced applications in for additional grants from the likes of the IDC. We are looking for investors actually to grow and push our company up to the next level.
Q: How important is green entrepreneurship? You are a green entrepreneur.
Oh, it’s key. In fact, it’s the only kind of enterprise there should be, not so? I mean, our name is the Green Cab, so it’s very much part of our DNA, as is women in the driving seat.
So, as I said, that’s where, in terms of emission reduction, congestion reduction, particularly particulate matter and greenhouse gases in cities, that’s where electric mobility can play an enormous role.
So generally the green economy, green power, because ideally our vehicles need to be powered by renewable sources, that’s definitely where the future lies.
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