In Kenya’s transport industry, fuel theft and reckless driving aren’t just occasional glitches, they’re daily threats eating into the bottomlines of fleet operators.
With fuel accounting for as much as 30 percent of management costs, even minor efficiencies can snowball into major financial losses.
At the centre of a new push to curb this is Horizon IoT Ltd, a Nairobi-based firm specialising in telematics—the branch of technology relating to vehicle tracking and monitoring.
Fuel theft takes different forms. There’s the siphoning that happens when a vehicle is parked, but there’s also theft that happens while on the move, via the return pipe in a tactic that’s invisible to the naked eye. It happens out of collusion between drivers and fuel station attendants.
Fredrick Oduogo, the director of telematics hardware at Horizon, says the tech fix combines industrial-grade fuel sensors with GPS trackers, feeding real-time data into a platform that alerts fleet managers to every refill, every drop lost and where it happened.
The system works though wired connections or via wireless protocols like Bluetooth, with data being transmitted via telco-backed connectivity.
If the vehicle is in a remote area where network coverage is limited, the system stores the data locally and uploads it once the signal is available.
“The core idea is visibility. You can’t manage what you can’t see. We’re offering visibility to the last litre of fuel, and the last second of behaviour behind the wheel,” Oduogo says.
“We’re pushing fleet managers to move away from manual logs and adopt a system-based analytics.”
Beyond stopping theft, the technology helps tackle more subtle but equally costly inefficiencies like engines left idling for hours or unauthorised route changes.
The software is able to distinguish between fuel used in motion and the one that is wasted while the vehicle is stationary.
The firm’s director of business development Solomon Mukewa says manual fuel logs are prone to manipulation and human error.
“Automated analytics are no longer a luxury. When fuel isn’t managed properly, that 30 per cent can rise to 45 or even 50 per cent of operating costs. That’s the difference between a profitable business and one that’s barely surviving,” he says.
But the tech solution is not one-size-fits-all.
While Horizon primarily targets trucks, pick-ups and heavy commercial vehicles, its sensors – available in lengths of 33 centimetres to five metres – can be tailored for smaller vehicles with narrower fuel tanks.
A standard fuel sensor set-up goes for Sh30,000 to Sh50,000, depending on the vehicle and sensor specifications.
Oduogo says the hardware is built to last, with wired versions offering near-permanent installation and Bluetooth units needing a battery replacement five to seven years.
Horizon is also betting big on video telematics, a system of AI-powered cameras that monitors driver behaviour, road conditions and cargo movement. At the centre is a management system, which incorporates a camera that faces the driver and uses AI to detect signs of distraction, fatigue, smoking or phone use.
The system records the incident, warns the driver and sends an alert to the fleet manager.
The management system has a front-facing camera that captures road violations. It processes short clips of the violations and pushes them to the cloud for review.
The cameras, which double up as GPS trackers, also support geo-fencing and location-based tracking. A basic two-channel system – usually a front-facing and a cabin camera – costs Sh35,000 to Sh40,000.
The video monitoring is part of a broader move towards compliance, insurance integration and risk management.
