In January, the taxi-app juggernaut set up shop on the crowded byways of Kenya’s capital city. It’s just the latest maneuver in Uber’s little-noticed emerging markets strategy, which has already seen the company plant flags in Cape Town, Lagos and New Delhi. For Uber, as for many corporations, the developing world’s potential upside is clear. With an estimated 3 billion people living there — almost half the world’s population — the growth opportunity is off the charts. Even more tantalizing: A predicted 1.3 billion people will move into cities between 2007 and 2025, half a billion of them in Africa and most of them without cars.

But here’s the thing: Already a bevy of local taxi apps operate in Nairobi, and while Uber has disrupted taxi markets from New York to Hong Kong, there are good reasons to expect roadblocks in the developing world. In Nairobi, rivals’ names are Maramoja (“very fast”), Easy Taxi (a Brazilian export) and Sasa Cabs (“now cabs”), among others, and each has tailored its service to the local market in one way or another. Banking on the universality of its technology, Uber has not taken local taxi culture into account much, unlike its competitors — it insists on giving users the exact same experience anywhere in the world. But the truth is that Nairobi is not Brooklyn, or San Francisco, or Washington, D.C. From culture to infrastructure to labor force, the challenges are different.

Read the article “Uber’s Battle For Kenya” on ozy.com.