Zuhura Wangara lives just outside Nairobi and, on a good day, spends at least five hours commuting. She uses a combination of buses and between four and six matatus – publicly operated shared minibus taxis – to get from her home in Kiambu to her workplace at the city’s southern limits.

“After work the same routine applies. I leave work around 5pm. I get to town, walk to our bus terminal, and get another ride home,” she says. “I get home from 8pm onwards depending on traffic and the hours we have to wait.”

It is a problem faced by millions in the Kenyan capital, where 3 million people and 400,000 vehicles are moving around the city every day. Wangara has given up hope that her journey will ever become easier.

Counting the cost

South African company WhereIsMyTransport, however, is working on a solution. The tech company has already built a platform providing formal transport information for South African cities like Johannesburg, Tshwane, Cape Town and Durban, as well as Cairo’s Metro.

It is branching into informally-run transit methods, starting with Nairobi’s matatus. The goal is to provide the data for the development of solutions to ease commuter pain. Co-founders Devin de Vries and Chris King met as students at the University of Cape Town, and spent many days waiting forlornly for university shuttles.

Such pain is shared across the board. The City of Cape Town’s transport authority found those in the lower income segment can spend up to 46% of their income on transport each month.

“Many riders have no access to information about transport except personal knowledge or those around them, and they can spend hours waiting around, missing connections, and be late to work,” De Vries said.

“We realised that there needed to be a single, centralised solution for transport data, and this was the missing piece that would enable many other services and products to succeed.”

The company works with operators and local authorities to capture data. Where there are no operators, as with informally-run minibus taxis, it collects its own data or uses partners.

The platform contains a multi-modal journey planner and fare estimator that allows users to plan the speediest and most cost-efficient journey to work, meaning app developers and service providers have all they need to roll out effective transport solutions.

WhereIsMyTransport is working on partnerships with local authorities. A major corporation has already contracted with the City of Johannesburg to create a public transport app using its data.

While in cities like London, the transport authority releases open data feeds on transport to developers, this data often does not exist in emerging cities.

Working with local government

Finding the right partners within local government can be a challenge, given the problems of dealing with large bureaucracies and an often ingrained lack of understanding of how tech works.

Yet De Vries said city officials are usually invested in providing better information and experience to their citizens. This view is echoed by Justin Coetzee, whose Cape Town-based company GoMetro uses data analytics and in-vehicle tech to connect different transport types into one app. GoMetro, the official app of South Africa’s railways, is used by 120,000 people monthly.

“It has been essential to work with customers who are visionary and who want to change the way things are traditionally done,” Coetzee said.

These clients are organisations like the University of Pretoria, the Gauteng Department of Transport, and local municipalities such as Mbombela and eThekwini.

Dr Bonolo Mathibela, a research scientist at IBM’s South Africa lab, says the beauty of tech transportation solutions is that information can be crowdsourced and harnessed without too much input from authorities.

Mathibela says authorities can benefit simply by properly utilising the data already at their fingertips.

“Tech can really change the way transport works. In terms of the provision of information we are seeing great progress,” she said.

All of which will be music to the ears of commuters like Wangara. Meanwhile, back in Nairobi, Ma3Route is providing a web, mobile app and SMS platform designed to enable travellers to share real-time information online via short messages and pictures.

“The community of users share useful details on road conditions and events happening on the roads as they’re travelling, providing valuable information and insights,” said Stephane Eboko, chief revenue officer at Ma3Route, which now has more than 500,000 active users.

“Our vision is that all people should be empowered with information and connections to make smart decisions impacting their city’s evolution.”

With this new technology coming to the fore, the hope is that transport will run more smoothly and smartly, making life for commuters like Wangara that little bit easier.

Talk to us on Twitter via @Guardianpublic and sign up for your free weekly Guardian Public Leaders newsletter with news and analysis sent direct to you every Thursday.