How The Alternative Bank’s Mata Zalla Initiative Is Putting Women in the Driver’s Seat
In Kano, a fleet of hot-pink electric tricycles is doing something the development world rarely manages, quietly changing women’s lives without asking them to wait.
There is a particular sound to Kano at seven in the morning. The call to prayer has barely faded when the city lurches to life: hawkers, horns, the clatter of gates being thrown open. And now, threaded through all of it, a soft, electric hum. Flashes of hot pink are cutting through the morning haze through electric tricycles, clean and near-silent, helmed by women who just months ago may never have imagined themselves behind the wheel of anything. These are trailblazing NaijaNatives powered by ambition, training, and a bold financial partnership that is redefining what women’s economic inclusion looks like in northern Nigeria.
This reality is being driven by the Mata Zalla initiative, and if it looks straightforward from the outside, a closer look reveals something far more carefully constructed. Behind those pink tricycles sits a partnership between The Alternative Bank, the UK government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, and electric mobility company Qoray. What they have built together in Kano is a bet on women, placed in one of Nigeria’s most tradition-bound cities, and it is paying off.
Blazing The Trail
Before the Bank got involved to scale the ambitions of these women, there was already a cooperative. The Mata Zalla Cooperative Society has been operating in Kano for years, its membership now exceeding 2,500 women from across all 44 of the state’s local government areas. Teachers, traders, farmers, women with formal education and women without it. What they share is the cooperative’s founding premise: that women’s empowerment is not a single intervention but a way of life.
Hauwa Ahmad Tarauni, who co-founded Mata Zalla, is clear-eyed about who the initiative is designed to serve. Speaking to News Central TV, she described the women at the heart of it:
“Most of the women we deal with are divorced or widowed, with children to care for. They face many difficulties because they have no trade or steady means to support themselves. We realised that this was a profitable business that women were not benefitting from, as it had been left almost entirely to men. But I know that in Kano, we have strong women who are capable of doing this work.”
The cooperative had the community and the trust. What it needed was a partner willing to back that community with something tangible, something that could not be undone when the press releases dried up and the cameras went home. The Alternative Bank stepped into that role.
How it Actually Works
The mechanics of the initiative are worth understanding, because they reveal an unusual level of care for what happens after the handover.
A total of 120 electric tricycles were distributed to women from the Mata Zalla and Yar Baiwa cooperatives. Each woman received training, not a one-afternoon affair, but proper instruction in driving, servicing, and maintaining her vehicle. The idea was that breakdowns should not become a financial catastrophe. A woman who understands her machine stays on the road; a woman who is dependent on a mechanic she cannot afford is always one puncture away from losing her income.
Then there is the infrastructure piece, which is easy to overlook but is arguably the most important part of the whole arrangement. A battery-swapping terminal was built within the Kano metropolis. When a tricycle’s battery runs low, the rider doesn’t stop and wait hours for a charge, rather, she swaps it in minutes and keeps moving. In a city where time is money, that detail is the difference between a business model that works and one that doesn’t.
The choice of electric vehicles was not incidental, either. With Nigeria’s petrol prices volatile and subsidies gone, the running costs of a fuel-powered keke can eat deeply into a rider’s daily earnings. An EV, by contrast, makes the economics of the route far more predictable. Less spent on fuel. More taken home.
What Pink Actually Means
Ask anyone why the tricycles are pink and you’ll get a practical answer: safety. Female commuters in Kano have long had to navigate public transport that is, at best, indifferent to their comfort. A women-only service, identifiable from fifty metres away, changes that calculus entirely.
Sarah Abner, a passenger, put it plainly when speaking to the media:
“I ride with her because she is a woman, like me. It is not considered appropriate for a woman to take a tricycle alone with a man, as it can compromise her dignity if their bodies come into contact. That’s why I prefer to ride with a female driver.”
Sarah’s words illuminate something that a programme document cannot easily capture: the social permission this initiative creates. Women who might otherwise arrange for a family member to accompany them, or simply not travel at all, can now hail a ride with a reasonable expectation of arriving safely and with their dignity intact. That is not a small thing. For many women, it is the precondition for everything else including going to the market, getting to the clinic, showing up to work.
For the drivers, pink means something different. In a city where women in the transport sector have historically been invisible, these riders cannot be missed. They are out there, every day, doing a job that was not supposed to be theirs. And doing it well.
The Bank Behind the Bet
It would be easy to frame The Alternative Bank’s involvement here as corporate social responsibility, a worthy side project, separate from the main business of banking. That framing would miss the point.
AltBank’s role in the Mata Zalla initiative is consistent with a broader institutional posture. This is a bank that has shown an appetite for precisely this kind of structural, multi-stakeholder deal, one that creates genuine economic infrastructure rather than one-off handouts. It brokered the relationship between a bilateral development donor, a private-sector mobility company, and a grassroots women’s cooperative. That is not charity. That is architecture, showing the blueprint of what could be when multi-sectorial stakeholders work together to build.
The question any serious financial institution has to answer when it enters this territory is: what happens when we leave? The Mata Zalla model is built to outlast the partnership that created it. The women own their routes. The cooperative provides a support structure. The battery-swapping terminal is a permanent piece of city infrastructure. The training is in their hands, not in a manual that gathers dust. According to Garba Mohammed, Executive Director at The Alternative Bank:
“That durability is the real metric. Not how many tricycles were handed over on launch day, but how many are still running a year from now. It was important that through this project, we provided these remarkably strong women with the infrastructure to match their drive.”
A Model Worth Replicating
The Mata Zalla Cooperative Society is already expanding. What began in Kano is now stretching towards other states, carrying with it a template that other state parastatals can learn from.
The template is not complicated. Start with a community that already exists. Find a financial partner willing to build infrastructure rather than just handing over assets. Bring in technical expertise. Train people properly. Then get out of the way.
Nigeria’s development challenge has never really been a shortage of good ideas. It has been a shortage of execution, really, the dearth of a connective tissue between vision and reality. What AltBank has done in Kano, through the Mata Zalla initiative, is provide exactly that connective tissue. The Bank has embodied this year’s International Women’s Day Theme, #GiveToGain, and in doing so, the Bank has created something rare, a programme that works, with women who are not waiting to be told what to do next. They are simply working, building something that belongs to them and those who they care for.
