What does TfC do?
By Mohamed Hegazy, September 15, 2020
We recently turned 5 years old. Since then, TfC has changed. Who are we? What do we do?
TfC creates shared value1 in the transport transition space.
- We provide data-driven consulting services & data products that support the transport transition.
- The TfC-way strives for excellence in service and product delivery.
- TfC collaborations scale our impact, creating value beyond our project boundaries.
How TfC supports the Transport Transition
The Vision: Sustainable Urban Mobility
The transport transition is a local and global imperative. Travel within emerging cities in Africa today is dominated by informal transportation systems, which harm the environment, take advantage of transport workers and provide a sub-optimal user experience and accessibility within cities. Cities are growing and societies urbanising, causing massive growth in transport systems.
Urban Mobility sits at the intersection of many social concerns, enables economic development and is a lived experience that affects quality of life. Climate change has presented us with many challenges, and transport will be one of the hardest to solve. Decarbonising the full system is necessary.2 We aim to create shared value and work on solving the challenge of transitioning transport towards sustainability.
We pursue Deep Decarbonisation, identify pathways, include transport workers in our work & produce gendered pro-poor solutions to transition the sector.
We understand the complexity of the sector across is value chain and optimise for shared value creation: societal & economic progress.
Projects & Services
Globally we focus on data. Our core vertical is data collection, analysis & visualisation in data-poor environments, particularly in Africa. To date, we worked in Cairo, Addis Ababa, Djibouti, and Kampala.
Locally, we focus on improving transportation. Our local horizontal is sustainable mobility.
The Urban Mobility Lab supports both sides with scientific research and by publishing data.
We map, study, model and publish on:
- Transport supply and demand across for all modes, including informal transport & Active Travel;
- Accessibility within Cities, and how it is affected by traffic congestion;
- Carbon Lock-In and Greenhouse Gas Emission trajectories and how new Technologies and Infrastructures affects them;
- Transport sector employment, organisation, regulation, policies and the way forward.
We provide data-driven consulting services, working with clients to define and solve specific problems related to the transport transition: What does the sector look like? How can we optimise it? What should be done?
We license data products to clients that enable them to build compelling service offerings and build new insights.
To date, we successfully delivered more than 20 projects across five countries.
The TfC-way
Balancing Stakeholders
As an employee-owned for-profit, our focus is on maximising the benefits relative to all costs. We balance these benefits across four primary stakeholders:
- Clients, whom we provide with successful competitive products & services.
- Society, whose issues are part & parcel of every project designed and delivered.
- The Team, whom TfC strives to provide with competitive and rewarding workplaces.
- Shareholders, whose capital we utilise to provide above-market returns.
How we approach projects and build products
TfC started as a project and is evolving into a professional company.
As we continue this institutional evolution, we designed a professional proposal pipeline for new projects. Each proposal follows three core values:
- An impactful vision centred around moon-shot objectives,
- Data-driven project design and theory-of-change,
- Activities designed around professional budgeting and work plan design.
A typical client proposal is designed and built-in 2-weeks of full-time work, sometimes more.
Successful proposals evolve into projects. The TfC-Way to project management follows a robust working methodology that we developed over five years working under challenging locales:
- A report driven milestone sequence to ensure client-project alignment, a transparent methodology and reproducible and evidence-based results.
- An agile, objective-driven project management workflow that balances with flexibility with achieving objectives,
- A scientific data-driven approach based on academic best practices and evidence-based reproducible results.
TfC_learns is a structured system to access skills and promote learning. Our working contracts dedicate a minimum of 15% of company time to learning.
A recent external independent audit described the culture of TfC as a “young organisation with high capability of adaptation and working at full speed”. It identified “positive points [that] refer to the professionalism, trust, and flexibility of the work environment, as well as the balance between challenges (of TfC’s mission and the work itself) and support.”
Cheers🥂 to the ones who enabled and continue to work with us
All of this is enabled by whom we work with:
- Early supporters, who gave us the initial runway to set TFC in motion, such as Etijah and Expo Live 2020.
- Project partners, who help us shape our products & services and provide us with a rich learning experience. These include university professors and academic research centres, global consultancies, governments and tech companies.
- Clients, who engage us on exciting and consequential projects.
- Our suppliers and local partners, often mission-driven advocates of open data and software.
Together, we strive to transition transportation across multiple domains:
- Enabling new consumer-facing innovations such as trip-planning that reaches everybody.
- Designing new infrastructure and the transport networks of the future.
- Envisioning sustainable transport systems, and the road-map to get there.
Next Steps
As we complete our internal transition from a project to a company, we strive to provide shared value in the transport transition space.
- Do you wish to join us to transition transport? Reach out here!
- Do you wish to learn more about our practice, and how we can support your projects and Objectives? Check out our practice profile here, and let’s have a chat.
[1] Porter, M. E. & Kramer, M. R. Creating Shared Value. Harvard Business Review (2011).