Zimbabwean social enterprise Mobility for Africa has sued the Toyota Mobility Foundation in U.S. federal court, alleging the foundation and its consultants misappropriated proprietary technology behind its solar-charged electric tricycle network across rural Zimbabwe. The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California — Western Division as case number 2:26-cv-05105 (Mobility for Africa v. Toyota Mobility Foundation, et al.). MFA is represented by Michael J. Bowe, Lauren Tabaksblat, and Heidi R. Goldsmith of Brithem LLP, and by David M. Stein and Nancy M. Olson of Olson Stein LLP. The filing follows several years of grant-funded collaboration between the two organizations on rural e-mobility deployment in Zimbabwe.
Highlights
- Case 2:26-cv-05105 filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California — Western Division, naming the Toyota Mobility Foundation and outside consultants as defendants.
- Claims include breach of contract, fraud, breach of fiduciary duty, and misappropriation of trade secrets, with MFA seeking compensatory damages, restitution, disgorgement of profits, and injunctive relief.
- MFA operates roughly 600 Hamba electric cargo tricycles across Zimbabwe’s Wedza District, supported by an off-grid battery-swapping network with bespoke lithium-ion packs and solar-powered charging stations.
- Prior public funding to MFA from Toyota Mobility Foundation totaled approximately $380,000 according to reporting on the company’s grant history.
The technology at the center of the dispute
MFA was founded in 2018 by Shantha Bloemen, a 21-year UNICEF veteran, and is organized in Mauritius with operations principally in Zimbabwe. Its flagship vehicle, the Hamba — Swahili for “to move” — is a cargo-capable electric tricycle designed for off-grid rural conditions. The vehicle carries up to roughly 1,000 pounds and operates from swappable lithium-ion battery packs that customers exchange at solar-supported charging stations for about $5 per swap.
The system was built around small-scale farmers, the majority of whom are women in rural communities where vehicle ownership and grid power are limited. As of recent public reporting, MFA had deployed roughly 600 Hambas across Zimbabwe, with approximately 70 percent of its customer base female. The company has been recognized with the Dubai Expo Live Innovation Grant, the EEP Africa Project of the Year Award, and the Ashden Award for Energy Access, among other distinctions.
What the complaint alleges
The complaint alleges that the Toyota Mobility Foundation and its outside consultants induced access to MFA’s intellectual property by representing that the parties would jointly develop similar mobility solutions across Africa. After obtaining that access, according to the filing, the defendants disengaged financially from MFA and excluded the company from related rural mobility efforts that they continued to develop and expand. The complaint further alleges that the defendants used MFA’s data and proprietary work to compete directly for grant funding and to bolster the foundation’s reputation in African markets.
MFA’s claims include breach of contract, fraud, breach of fiduciary duty, and misappropriation of trade secrets. The company is seeking compensatory damages, restitution, disgorgement of profits, and an injunction barring further use of its proprietary work.
“This is an indefensible exploitation of a small social enterprise company formed and dedicated to improve the lives of Africans, particularly women, by one of the most powerful companies in the world and its outside consultants who had no meaningful prior experience in Africa,” said Bowe, co-founding partner of Brithem LLP and lead counsel for MFA. “This behavior belies any serious claim that Toyota really cares about the problems it says it is dedicated to alleviating. If it did really care, it would have promoted and supported this and other similarly successful social enterprise organizations and initiatives instead of simply taking the fruits of their hard work to claim as Toyota’s own for public relations purposes.”
Bloemen tied the dispute to broader funding patterns for women-led ventures. “Women entrepreneurs everywhere get only a fraction of the start-up capital that men do, and in Africa it is harder still, with most impact finance flowing to a handful of markets and a handful of companies, almost all of them led by men,” she said. “Toyota was happy to learn from our years of work building off-grid rural e-mobility in Zimbabwe. But rather than investing in the African entrepreneurs who built it, they chose to copy, replicate, and control what we created.”
The complaint also alleges the defendants’ conduct stripped MFA of the first-mover advantage it had built in a market segment it created and diverted grant funding by competing directly with MFA using MFA’s own data. When Bloemen raised her concerns, the complaint alleges, the defendants did not respond.
Context: a documented partnership history
Public records and prior press coverage place the Toyota Mobility Foundation among MFA’s named grantors and technical supporters dating to at least 2019. According to a 2025 report in Newsday Zimbabwe, MFA had raised approximately $6 million in total funding since 2019 — about half from grants — with around $380,000 attributed to the Toyota Mobility Foundation. Toyota Mobility Foundation materials and partner statements from InfraCo Africa describe Toyota as having provided technical support to MFA’s Harare assembly facility on vehicle quality and safety standards, and MFA’s own communications have credited Toyota Mobility Foundation with helping place mechanics trained through Toyota Zimbabwe apprenticeships into the company’s Hamba modification team.
Neither the Toyota Mobility Foundation nor Toyota Motor Corporation has issued a public response to the complaint at the time of filing. The Toyota Mobility Foundation continues to list rural e-mobility work in Sub-Saharan Africa among its program areas.
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