Yango Ride has expanded its “She Moves” programme in Oman through a partnership with Thawani Pay, a move aimed at giving female partner drivers access to discounts and offers intended to ease daily costs and improve take-home earnings. Under the arrangement, women driving on the platform will be enrolled into Thawani’s Sama benefits platform, which provides offers across categories such as food, hospitality, beauty and other consumer services through the Thawani app.
The tie-up adds a practical financial layer to a programme that Yango launched in Oman in October 2025 as part of a wider push to bring more women into the mobility workforce. That earlier initiative was framed around professional training, skills development and community support under the policy umbrella of Oman Vision 2040, which places greater emphasis on workforce participation, diversification and broader social inclusion. By linking She Moves to a savings platform rather than only a recruitment drive, Yango is signalling that retention and day-to-day affordability matter as much as onboarding.
For ride-hailing platforms, that distinction is important. Recruiting women drivers can help address supply constraints, widen service options for female passengers and improve brand positioning in markets where safety, comfort and cultural fit shape transport choices. Yet the harder task often comes after recruitment: keeping drivers active when fuel, maintenance, food and household costs pressure earnings. Sama’s structure, as presented by Thawani, is built around approved offers made available through participating entities, with the company saying the platform is designed to improve employee satisfaction and provide instant access to discounts across a broad merchant network.
Yango has already been marketing the female driver proposition in Oman on flexibility and income. On its Oman pages, the company says women can choose their own schedules and advertises average earnings of about OMR500 a month for female taxi drivers, while also highlighting testimonials from women who describe the work as a useful source of household support and supplementary income. Those claims reflect the company’s pitch, not guaranteed pay, but they help explain why a savings partnership fits neatly into its broader narrative of economic empowerment.
Context matters here because Oman’s labour market still shows a wide gap between male and female participation. World Bank gender data places female labour-force participation in Oman at about 30% in 2025, while the International Monetary Fund has described women’s participation as being around 32% in 2023, far below men’s rate. That makes even modest, targeted measures in consumer-facing sectors politically and economically significant, especially when they align with official goals to widen women’s role in the labour market without requiring large-scale public spending.
Thawani, for its part, has been building Sama into a broader lifestyle-benefits product. Its own material describes the platform as an offers system for government and private-sector employees and their families, while separate company announcements show it being rolled out through partnerships with employers and institutions in Oman. That suggests Yango is not creating a one-off discount scheme from scratch, but plugging female drivers into an existing fintech-enabled benefits ecosystem that Thawani has been trying to scale.
The commercial logic is straightforward. Ride-hailing companies increasingly compete not only on fares and app performance but on the quality of support they offer drivers. Financial wellness tools, rewards, fuel arrangements, service discounts and insurance tie-ins are becoming part of the operating model in many markets. For Yango in Oman, where it brands its service locally as OTaxi and works through local transport partners, adding discounts through a mobile payments platform could improve loyalty at a time when platforms across the region are under pressure to show they can deliver sustainable income opportunities rather than only flexible work rhetoric.
There is also a social and reputational dimension. Women-only or women-focused transport initiatives in Gulf markets often attract attention because they sit at the intersection of employment, mobility access and public comfort. A programme that helps female drivers reduce everyday spending may appear modest, but it addresses a concrete friction point: income lost to the ordinary cost of living. That can matter as much as headline-grabbing recruitment targets, particularly for women balancing paid work with family obligations or using platform driving to supplement another job.
The tie-up adds a practical financial layer to a programme that Yango launched in Oman in October 2025 as part of a wider push to bring more women into the mobility workforce. That earlier initiative was framed around professional training, skills development and community support under the policy umbrella of Oman Vision 2040, which places greater emphasis on workforce participation, diversification and broader social inclusion. By linking She Moves to a savings platform rather than only a recruitment drive, Yango is signalling that retention and day-to-day affordability matter as much as onboarding.
For ride-hailing platforms, that distinction is important. Recruiting women drivers can help address supply constraints, widen service options for female passengers and improve brand positioning in markets where safety, comfort and cultural fit shape transport choices. Yet the harder task often comes after recruitment: keeping drivers active when fuel, maintenance, food and household costs pressure earnings. Sama’s structure, as presented by Thawani, is built around approved offers made available through participating entities, with the company saying the platform is designed to improve employee satisfaction and provide instant access to discounts across a broad merchant network.
Yango has already been marketing the female driver proposition in Oman on flexibility and income. On its Oman pages, the company says women can choose their own schedules and advertises average earnings of about OMR500 a month for female taxi drivers, while also highlighting testimonials from women who describe the work as a useful source of household support and supplementary income. Those claims reflect the company’s pitch, not guaranteed pay, but they help explain why a savings partnership fits neatly into its broader narrative of economic empowerment.
Context matters here because Oman’s labour market still shows a wide gap between male and female participation. World Bank gender data places female labour-force participation in Oman at about 30% in 2025, while the International Monetary Fund has described women’s participation as being around 32% in 2023, far below men’s rate. That makes even modest, targeted measures in consumer-facing sectors politically and economically significant, especially when they align with official goals to widen women’s role in the labour market without requiring large-scale public spending.
Thawani, for its part, has been building Sama into a broader lifestyle-benefits product. Its own material describes the platform as an offers system for government and private-sector employees and their families, while separate company announcements show it being rolled out through partnerships with employers and institutions in Oman. That suggests Yango is not creating a one-off discount scheme from scratch, but plugging female drivers into an existing fintech-enabled benefits ecosystem that Thawani has been trying to scale.
The commercial logic is straightforward. Ride-hailing companies increasingly compete not only on fares and app performance but on the quality of support they offer drivers. Financial wellness tools, rewards, fuel arrangements, service discounts and insurance tie-ins are becoming part of the operating model in many markets. For Yango in Oman, where it brands its service locally as OTaxi and works through local transport partners, adding discounts through a mobile payments platform could improve loyalty at a time when platforms across the region are under pressure to show they can deliver sustainable income opportunities rather than only flexible work rhetoric.
There is also a social and reputational dimension. Women-only or women-focused transport initiatives in Gulf markets often attract attention because they sit at the intersection of employment, mobility access and public comfort. A programme that helps female drivers reduce everyday spending may appear modest, but it addresses a concrete friction point: income lost to the ordinary cost of living. That can matter as much as headline-grabbing recruitment targets, particularly for women balancing paid work with family obligations or using platform driving to supplement another job.
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