So Who Can Ride a Bicycle?
by Michael Linke

If you've ever tried too hard to impress a date you'll sympathise. My date, in this case, was also a colleague from the 'bikes for development' field. We met at a conference, and within a month she took some time off to visit one of my organisation's new partners in Northern Namibia. In an atmosphere of teenage lust and professional curiosity, we had five days of driving to discover the potential for future collaborations of all kinds. We also had a pick up truck full of refurbished, ex-UK Royal Mail postal delivery bicycles to deliver to a small village.

I'd received an email from the project's founder, a local woman who had grown up in the village. Shocked by the impact of HIV/AIDS on a generation of young people in her community, she decided to put some of the skills and resources acquired from running small businesses in a nearby city back into her village, and had established an orphan and vulnerable children (OVC) support centre, part of a growing network of similar grassroots projects in Namibia. From my organisation she had requested bicycles for use by her team of volunteer child carers.

After an official welcome with the usual song, dance and speeches, we started gathering data on the recipients of the bikes. These village-based carers were responsible for monitoring a group of several hundred OVCs, some of the 100,000 parentless kids in Namibia.

We decided to use a participatory mapping exercise to collect transport information. The most time consuming task in running the support centre, gathering firewood, occurred by headloading from an area of the map designated 'too sandy for bicycle'. But not to worry, many of the other tasks could be accomplished by bike. Right? Well, in theory. But then my date asked the question, 'so who can ride a bicycle?' Of the ten people in the discussion group, 9 of them women, only one had previously owned a bike (the man, of course), and only one of the women could actually ride a bike.

Next question. 'So what would be your ideal means of transport?' The translation into the local language. The conferring among the group, the ripple of agreement, concurring syllables and consensus. The translation. 'They would really like donkey carts'.

Why was I unaware of any of this before cementing this partnership with a surfeit of a largely unwanted resource? Development cowboy, poser, buffoon! I had relied too heavily on one source of information, assumed a high level of awareness about the project's needs and gone ahead. The project founder, who I admire and respect, had also made some assumptions, and because I admired and respected her, I didn't think to question them.

I recently heard some advice on tackling time constraints in the field, offered by a proponent of rapid rural assessment by consultants based on other continents. 'Just speak to the right person'. In this case, I'd have thought the local woman who founded the organisation would have been the right person. And for some information she was. But her team of volunteers in the village were also the right people, and from my office 750km away I had no way of communicating with them. Only through spending time with a lot of different people involved were we able to see that bicycles wouldn't solve all of this project's transport problems.

This partnership threw up another issue we're constantly faced with: creating a sense of ownership. Promoting ownership of a bicycle isn't just about keeping the chain oiled. In the case of Namibian women working as outreach volunteers, it can mean having the confidence to refuse an overbearing husband the right to use or sell it as he wishes. We hadn't discussed ownership with this project beforehand, and it soon became clear that people in this village had conflicting ideas about it. Everyone had assumed that the bikes would remain at the childcare centre, and no one was receptive to our suggestion that if everyone took possession of one bike they would also provide benefits in their personal lives, and might receive better care if one owner were responsible.

As part of our operations we sell some bikes at subsidised prices to community based entrepreneurs, but with bikes for community healthcare volunteers we don't ask for payment. Nowadays to address ownership we spend several hours in discussion with every beneficiary in an effort to make clear the link between their volunteer work and the resource they're receiving, as well as addressing problems and concerns they may have about their new asset.

In a recent discussion about ownership strategies, a colleague chastised me for not charging volunteers for their bikes. 'But', I protested, 'If the UN decided that my work was worthwhile and bought me a 4x4 to help me do it better, I'd just be grateful for the recognition. It would make me more motivated to do my work, because I wouldn't get stuck in the sand on the way to villages anymore, and I'd feel a sense of pride about being awarded such a useful piece of equipment.' Apart from that, I argued, it's men who control most household income, and it would be men who the mostly female volunteers would go to for the cash to buy the bike, and it would be men who would then view the asset as belonging to them.

Back in the village, the story did have a promising ending. We returned the next day and found that a malarial child had been delivered to the clinic in the front basket of one of the bikes. The journey would usually have taken 45 minutes and would have involved carrying the child, but by bike was only 15 minutes and a lot more comfortable. And a lot of the non-cyclists had progressed rapidly to taking their first pedal strokes. I could look my date in the eye again, and I guess she saw some potential, as we're still collaborating, in many ways.