Marian Muthui: The unstoppable force assembling Kenya’s first electric buses

When we meet Marian Muthui at Kenya Vehicle Manufacturers, Thika, she is thrilled to show us the two electric buses she and her team recently assembled from the ground up.

These are the first electric buses to be assembled in the country.

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“The electric buses that ply Nairobi routes were imported, and some touch-up work was done on them.

"But we are changing that by now assembling the cars right here and cutting down on costs,” she beams.

Marian is the new product introduction (NPI) programme manager at BasiGo Kenya.

Born in the 90s, she spent a bit of her childhood in London, UK, and in Washington, DC, USA. She, however, spent most of her childhood and school life in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi.

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“My childhood as a lastborn with two older sisters was fun, playful, and also academic-focused because my parents wanted me to excel as much as possible.

"I was a cheeky child, and I remember several times I unscrewed my parents’ TV just to see what was inside,” she recounts with a smile.

A project given to her class by a teacher at Loreto Convent Msongari while she was in Form 3 led her down her mechanical engineering career path.

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“We were told to imagine our dream careers and put that on a vision board.

"And I remember thinking about mechanical engineering because, at that point, I was really into cars.

"My dream then was to design cars for Bentley.

“I even envisioned myself travelling to Europe and working with Bentley. I used to buy car magazines, and so I would place pictures of cars on that board.

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"After high school, when I was thinking about what to study, I looked at that vision board, and knew exactly what I wanted to do.

“When I joined the University of Nairobi (UoN) for my undergraduate studies in 2009, there were not as many women in my course as I would have hoped.

"In the first year, we were a class of 100 and we only had 11 girls. That number stayed through to the fifth year.

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"Being at the UoN was the spark that got me excited about engineering,” she narrates.

After graduating, Marian joined a multinational company, General Electric, as a biomedical engineer.

She would visit hospitals across Kenya and within Africa, fixing machines such as MRIs and CTs as well as anaesthesia machines.

“I would be there with my toolbox, going into different hospitals, fixing machines.

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"One day I showed up at an interior hospital in rural Ghana to fix one of their machines and they could not believe I was there for that.

"They probably expected a man, a well-built man, not a young woman.”

She had been at General Electric for two-and-a-half years when she felt the need to enrol for a master’s programme.

“I was looking for opportunities abroad because I wanted to get that exposure before moving back to Kenya.

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"So, I made my applications, and I was able to get selected into a school in Scotland called the University of Stratford.”

A week before her trip in September 2016, she went to pick up her visa, and to her shock, the visa had been denied.

There was a problem with her application, leading to the denial.

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“This was quite devastating: I had bought my air ticket, said goodbye to my friends, and now I was back to square one: no job and I wouldn’t be furthering my studies.

"Thankfully, I did not have responsibilities then and I had a bit of savings to keep me going, so I decided to take a gap year to rethink and re-strategise.”

It was during this gap year that she reconnected with her love for mentoring schoolchildren, and so she merged her passion for education with her interest in tech and engineering.

“While at the university, I had started an initiative called Mekatilili, though it wasn’t active until this point when I took the gap year.

"So under Mekatilili, we conducted different programmes around tech, computer science, physical computing and robotics in different primary schools, high schools, and even partnered with universities.

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"We even ran workshops in human-centred design, doing a lot of experiential design work with students, getting them exposed to industry and understanding what could be created from an engineering perspective to solve local challenges,” she recalls.

“This picked up rather quickly, and it gave me exposure and the chance to put myself out there speaking about the work we were doing.

"Mekatilili opened international doors for me, and I was able to travel to countries like Denmark, France, and the US, where I would talk about the impact Mekatilili had on students.

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“In one of those travels, in Bordeaux, France, where I was presenting on the work I did with Mekatilili, someone came up to me afterwards, and he said he was touched and impressed by what we had achieved in a short while.

"He then handed me his business card and on it was written Mitch Resnick, the director of Lifelong Kindergarten at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

"He further told me that if I ever considered getting a master’s degree at MIT, I should reach out to him.”

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When she came back to Kenya, she did her research and was sure she wanted to be part of the MIT media lab and research group.

She immediately reached out to Mr Resnick and ended up securing a fully sponsored opportunity as a graduate student and research assistant at the MIT Media Lab.

She left for the US in June 2018 and graduated in May 2020, amid the Covid lockdown.

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“The experience at MIT remains the greatest ever. I had never envisioned myself in such an institution, but now getting there and having to go through their training remains surreal,” she notes nostalgically.

In July of 2021, she got a job with Rivian Motors in California, USA, where she served as a senior programme manager up until February 2023.

“I wanted to come back to Kenya and work here as a way of giving back and empowering my country, though I was not clear on the timelines.

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"All this while I was in groups of Kenyan mechanical engineers across the globe, where job opportunities are constantly shared.

"As I was still calculating my next move after the stint at Rivian Motors, the CEO of BasiGo reached out to me and sold to me the organisation’s dream of transitioning Kenya’s mobility industry into clean energy.

"I was sold out, and that is how I joined the organisation in August 2023.”

Marian says her greatest achievement is being part of the inaugural team that has assembled Kenya’s first electric buses.

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“I am so grateful for this milestone. Our aim is to have assembled 100 buses by the year-end.

"I work with a dynamic team, mostly made up of young women, and this shows how bright the future is for our Kenyan girls.”

“My message to all women out there is my day-to-day mantra borrowed from Steve Jobs: ‘Stay hungry, stay foolish.’ Which means we should never stop learning and we should always strive to try new things.”

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