Naiparq: Firm easing parking in Nairobi with click of a button

Naiparq co-founders Joan Yieke and Richard Otolo. Naiparq is a smart parking solution app [Courtesy]

Nairobi, a thriving metropolis and regional hub, is a tough city for commuters and motorists.

The city is famed for its huge traffic snarl-ups and scarcity of parking spaces. However, Kenya’s capital is not short of innovators seeking to reduce motorists’ pain by the use of technology.

Naiparq is one such firm. Available on the web or mobile application, the Naiparq platform matches a motorist to a parking space.

The Smart Parking Solutions founders developed the app after coming across multiple research describing the commuters’ pain in Nairobi.

One such research was the International Business Machines (IBM) Commuter Pain Survey in 2011 which ranked Nairobi’s roads as the fourth most congested, where motorists feel the most pain when heading to work or finding parking.

Ms Joan Yieke, the co-founder of Naiparq, told Enterprise the innovation was after they spent time talking to motorists and parking operators, who felt the most pain.

Parking operators list their parking spaces on the platform and earn money from unused parking spaces.

Joan and her team noticed that most private parking spaces were operating below capacity. “The challenge they (parking operators) were facing is visibility. They also don’t know how to market these spaces or even don’t have such budgets,” said Joan. “So we thought of a solution to the parking problem ... instead of trying to create new parking spaces, why don’t we make visible and open up underutilised spaces?” 

The firm is listing parking space operators in the central business district (CBD) having started with Upperhill. It has set their sights on Westlands.

They are not touching city council parking spaces but focusing on the underutilised private ones. “In a way, we are going to help them (city authorities) further reduce city traffic by opening up private parking spaces,” she said.

Owing to the limited city’s infrastructure, parking has become a big business and key revenue source for the county which charges Sh200 daily. With over 1.3 million motorists, Nairobi has about 6,125 parking spaces according to the 2019 parliamentary report.

Recently, the city announced plans to have businesses offering private parking services to obtain licences, which could increase parking costs in the city.

The county collected about Sh1.5 billion in the financial year ended June 2021. But overall, convincing businesses to list with them has been tough and even tougher in the CBD.

“You find that these parking operators are businesses that are jointly owned or owned by an institution, so the decision to list on an app is not a one-man show but a group decision... there’s a lot of bureaucracy,” she said.

Joan says outside Nairobi CBD, it’s much easier to find smaller parking space operators and onboarding them into their system has fewer red tapes for such partnerships.

Once a motorist downloads the app, they can find space, book and pay for it in advance. “When you’re coming into the CBD, you already know where you’re going to exactly park,” she said.

This means motorists can find safe and convenient parking spaces without much sweat. It takes only about 30 seconds to book a space on the user-friendly app.

One of the findings by the IBM Survey shows that Nairobi motorists use an average of 31.7 minutes to locate parking space which is way above the average global average of 19.8 minutes.

Motorists can also book for other services such as a car wash and pay for only the time that they use the parking space. This means one can access short-term parking for even as low as Sh30.

Whereas parking operators have the daily flat rate they charge, the Naiparq platform can break it down depending on the time a motorist has parked for.

The firm is also digitising parking services management and reducing conflicts between motorists and parking operators.

As with any start-up, it’s not been an easy path for Naiparq which was launched in December last year during the Kenya Innovation Week.

To run the start-up, they’ve taken lessons from The Lean Startup, a book by Eric Reiss which advises innovators and entrepreneurs on the best business strategies.

Joan observed that optimisation of user feedback is key in improving their services as they don’t want to burn money on an application people may never use.

“We want to make sure it works first then we work on the other things that make a platform high-tech such as super intuitiveness and the aesthetics,” she said.

For Naiparq, it’s been a learning curve on their business journey by doing it themselves through research and borrowing a leaf from other innovators.

They’ve avoided the mistake that start-ups make of just building an application and forcing it on the market.

This is through understanding the problem, talking to people with this problem and concentrating around that segment

“The tech comes way after this but there’s no one to tell start-ups about such a process. Many start-ups go and build the tech first then struggle when they go to the market.” She observes that there are only a few institutions to help start-ups with links to investors or even help them become investor-ready.

Felix Otieno, a Naiparq co-founder, says that it was easier for them to learn through the process. “With Naiparq we’ve essentially taken it through what an accelerator or incubator would have done. Right now we are confident, even the data is showing that we have come up with a product that people love and want to use,” he said.

There are grim statistics on the life of start-ups. Felix explained that Naiparq has a strategy that will prevent the firm from stagnating. “We are looking at taking a marketing approach in phases so that whatever data we get from the market; we factor it into Naiparq.”

“This is to make sure that we are on a growth trajectory at all times, feedback of any kind whether negative or positive is addressed,” said Felix.

Naiparq is a pioneer in the field. The firm is also banking on getting a solid investor to scale and market its brand. An investor would improve the app’s purpose, create employment by adding a team and marketing the business.