Real estate company Dowgate Properties opened its flagship Safari Centre highway service station in Naivasha in May this year. The company is owned by James Hoddell who is also the Founder and Director.
Services and facilities
The Safari Centre hosts various facilities including electric vehicle charging stations, children’s play areas, rest rooms, restaurants, and retail stores, right beside the highway. It also has a car wash, pharmacy, a petrol station, curio shops and a Dr Mattress store. The rest rooms are an entirely new kind of designer-rest rooms, under Dowgate’s high-tech rest-room brand, Loo4U.
Travelers will also have different food store choices to purchase foods and snacks. The Centre is being anchored by supermarket Naivas and a wide range of eateries, including ArtCaffe, Chicken Inn, Creamy Inn, Galitos, and Pizza Inn, all which are great choices for food and snacks.
Naivas has opened at the Safari Centre with plans to service some of the 400,000 local shoppers in and around Naivasha. An estimated 200,000 travellers a month who are expected to stop at the service centre. This is the 84th Naivas store in the country.
Electric car charging point
The centre’s electric charging points are the first outside Nairobi and will make it possible for electric vehicles to drive from Nairobi to Kisumu and back. They will be able to charge their cars each way at the Naivasha Safari Centre.
The firm joins others like ChargeNet and Drive Electric, which have set up centres in Nairobi to provide the equivalent of petrol stations for electric cars.
The launch of the electric car charging point comes as the momentum for adopting electric vehicles in Kenya grows steadily, with calls for clean energy solutions to reverse climate change impact get louder.
The Safari Centre in Naivasha is the first of many. The company currently has ongoing projects at various stages of construction on the Nairobi to Nyeri road at Makutano in Kirinyaga.
With further electric charging stations at Makutano, the developer’s second centre will ensure it is possible to travel from Nairobi to the Mount Kenya region using an electric vehicle.
