Inside World Bicycle Relief, Kenya

Rural Kenya, 4 a.m. Joseph wakes up without an alarm, a smooth hop out of bed, shimmying out from under the mosquito net with neither a groan nor a stretch. He is a man of habit, well settled into this routine by now, with no complaints, whispering so as not to wake up his girlfriend. He makes his side of the bed. He unfolds his faded soccer shirt, puts on his stained sweatpants, and scrubs the sleep from his hazelnut eyes. He unlatches the door and wheels our bikes outside, fumbling for his tools in the early hours: a bundle of sticks, two burlap sacks, a ball of cut inner tubes.

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The drums from next door signal that church is beginning. It’s still dark as the neighbors light their charcoal and prepare for the day. The toilets are broken. The power is out. We meander outside and pee in the road as the tractors gain speed in the haze, sugar cane rattling off their trailers, four boys hanging onto the back, peeling the leftovers with their teeth on the ride to the farm.

Joseph, 35, the youngest of seven in his father’s first marriage, he wanted to be a doctor most of his life. But his dad, with his two other families and the strained earnings of a manager at the sugar factory—one of the largest factories in all of Africa before it was shut down due to corruption—could never afford to put Joseph through medical school. They were getting by, living here in the factory barracks. Joseph was a footballer, a cyclist, smart, energetic. Wide-eyed with a few too many questions.

Joseph’s older cousin was delivering charcoal by bike from the forest into town to make some money. He brought Joseph in, and since he was a teenager, he’s been doing this—20 years now of hauling heavy bags and pedaling circles. His body wears the mileage well. His arms are lean, with light creases and a spot of greying coming in just behind the eyes. He’s ridden hundreds of thousands of miles by now. We set out for another 60 together.

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Joseph gets on the bike easily, locked into his sagging and torn saddle, a ring of his bell at the kids still brushing their sleep from their own eyes. We’re riding from the barracks and into the forest, past rows of sugar cane plantations, through the hills and over rivers, under the pearling crescent moon still hanging on the horizon. It’s dark, and Joseph is riding mostly by feel. We’re just two kilometers from the equator, and already I’m sweating trying to keep up.

Joseph is a part of the test rider team at World Bicycle Relief (WBR). In exchange for a free bike six years ago, they monitor the wear and the mileage. They prototype parts. They try new things and see how they break. Joseph is a special use case; he and his fellow charcoal riders carry over 200 pounds of charcoal most days along these rutted-out and potholed roads. He’s broken several racks already, and undoubtedly, more will come. The rest of this bike, already some 50,000 miles into its tenure, has fared really well. Joseph glides on top of his Buffalo, cutting around potholes and strapping down his day’s earnings with a practiced ease. Today, he’ll make $12. And that’s actually pretty decent here.

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This is all a part of the ongoing thought exercise that is the WBR operations in Kenya. The other 20 countries WBR operates in only have a few test riders. Kenya already boasts over 50. Kenya leads the way, designing the new Buffalo models and developing new ways of running the entire operation, changing how donation is done, how sales will work, and how power is shared. Kenya is the laboratory of World Bicycle Relief, full of smart Kenyans thinking really hard—a pile of messy whiteboards, stuffed notebooks, coordination meetings, and field surveys. And Joseph, a light groan as he pushes off with the load, his broken fender rattling into the wheel, his data transmitter spinning on his front hub, he is yet one more person working in this chain to better his community, transforming transportation in rural Africa, one more heavy bicycle at a time.

World Bicycle Relief began in 2005 after SRAM co-founder FK Day and his wife Leah surveyed tsunami damage in Sri Lanka. They saw how the roads were destroyed and transportation was virtually impossible. They raised money and donated pallets of bikes as a one-time thing, trying to help a community in need. But when they returned a few years later, they saw that the bikes had larger, unintended benefits. Kids were going to school on them. Businesses were more independent.

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Through the network of SRAM engineers, they built their own bike, the Buffalo, and developed a strategy for getting it into the hands of other communities that would benefit from it. They saw the far-reaching benefits for farmers, community health volunteers, and kids in rural schools. Regularly, children spend a quarter of their day walking to and from school. They’re vulnerable on the way there and tired when they arrive. Girls drop out of school 20 percent less if given a bike.

And that’s a really big deal.

They’ve learned a lot in these last 20 years, and WBR is evolving yet again. To scale, recently they’re trying to sell more bicycles. Because the more bikes you sell, the more you can then donate. World Bicycle Relief has opened 88 bike shops, they’ve started mobile repair trucks, they’re advertising on the radio, they’re working on new models, one with two gears, one with a derailleur, and eventually an e-bike too. They sell more than they donate nowadays. But they’re still donating a ton. Thousands a month. And they still see this as just the start.

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Without WBR, bicycles here would still exist. People ride these clunky Chinese roadsters everywhere, the “black mamba,” as it’s lovingly referred to, the bike most kids in rural Africa learned how to ride on, hunched under the top tube with their friends on the back. The black mamba has carried millions of people on its back, building lives and helping communities. But WBR thinks they can do better, and with this close attention to the rider, listening to test riders like Joseph, iterating now their 19th version of the Buffalo bike, integrating the feedback from factory to mechanic to rider, tuning the bike, branding it, and building shops to provide spare parts and training hundreds of field mechanics, they all combine to form a greater bicycle ecosystem. And this is the value case they’re proposing to their new buyers.

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Michael

St. Peter’s Upanda Secondary School was one of the last schools in Kenya to get electricity. The principal, Michael Arianda, sits up tall as he declares that this is no longer, that the lights work and even a new classroom is on the way. He sits up even taller when he says this year, for the first time in the nine years this school has existed, they will send a student, and maybe even two, to university. “We will be contributing to the betterment of this country! Of course, I’m proud. It’s like when you see a doctor, and you can say, ‘That one came from my hand.'”

Michael is new here, returning back to his home county after studying English at university and teaching in Nairobi for a few years. He shakes the table as he talks with the deep throes of his voice, crushes my hand as I walk in, and uses a very academic English. His desk, in the back corner of the former chemistry lab now taken over for administration, is a mess of books and binders and papers. The four of us barely fit inside, hunched together on our plastic chairs. A faded and worn copy of Hard Times by Charles Dickens sits on top of his desk. It is his favorite book. Michael somehow even talks like Charles Dickens.

The school has seen a remarkable transformation in the past few years. Their students have been climbing the ranks, nearing the dreaded C+ cutoff for university for years now. Their enrollment is up, almost tripling in the three years since WBR began their work here in 2021. WBR is here on a Wednesday afternoon, dropping off another 120 bikes and trying to keep up with the rising demand. Often, kids will transfer schools to one receiving bikes in the hopes that they will get one. That, coupled with the rising reputation tied to this strong talking principal, means this school is booming.

With the bike rollout here in 2021, WBR also began their new model with schools. Now, the school owns the bike. And when the kids graduate, they will return the bike and it will be given to the incoming students. The bikes serve to replace the school bus, something often too expensive and big to be used here on these roads. But two years later, the students are graduating and disappearing with the bikes. They would rather keep the bike than get their certificate.

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“It is all about discipline” says Michael, his strong voice rattling the shudders behind him. In his office, everyone shakes hands and talks fast, a mix of Swahili, Luo, and English. Serious, calculated, and present. He personally will ensure the bikes are returned this year. And he butts into my scribbling and points at my notebook, “And I want you to write this down. I do not tolerate cheating in my school.”

Of course, there have been problems with the program over the years. After almost a million bikes, things are bound to not always go smoothly. Bikes have been stolen, some are neglected, parents sometimes take them from their kids. Some schools have been found siphoning money from the spare parts fund to pay for food for the students. Bikes even sometimes go to kids who already have bikes. But how the organization responds, how they adapt, how they move forward, that’s the key.

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Peter, the field manager of WBR, and Michael cut into Kiswahili, talking faster, shaking hands, figuring this out. Kids will now give their bikes back before their final exam. The principal will really highlight how important it is that the next rank of kids receive the same opportunity. Kids won’t get bikes until both they and their parents sign a contract saying how the bike will and will not be used. And the chief will be sent to retrieve last year’s missing bikes.

We walk together, Michael holding my hand and pointing out the new power lines, the new gate, the stacks of Buffalo bikes piled under the awning, and we pull out our chairs at the front of the gathered assembly of parents, teachers, and students. The principal calls the entire school out, even those who aren’t receiving bikes and those who already have bikes, so they can understand the gravity of the situation. Everyone jumps between English and Kiswahili and Luo, the parents stand up to say a few things, we begin with prayer, we end with a song of thanks. The principal nods to Peter, and says, “These bicycles have really helped our school. We would give you our heart if we could, but sadly we cannot, so we settle for a capital letter thank you. Thank you.” And when a pause allows, the students clap.

In every school we’ve gone to for distributions, the ceremony is long and formal, with speeches and songs and dances and chants. The kids play football and ride the bikes with their friends on the back and laugh. They ring the bells and eagerly pose for photos and go for test rides. It is a great celebration of joy. But also every school we’ve been to this last week that is receiving a top-up has seen remarkable improvement since the bicycle program began. Barolengo Mixed Secondary went from ranked 35th in the county in 2018 to 8th this past year. Nyambare’s enrollment is up, absence is down, and college admissions are up as well. Every school they work in sees an improvement. Never has WBR seen a school go backward. But Michael isn’t content with the norm, with steady, with just okay. “Listen to me. If I only see one or two percent progress, I’m taking the bikes back. Now that you have these, I want to see you really do better. I want to see real improvement!”

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The enemy, the bad guy, the other team WBR is working against, especially in Kenya, is the motorcycle riders. Kenya, being more developed than the other countries they operate in, has motorcycles everywhere. But they’re expensive, they’re unsustainable, and they’re super dangerous. My girlfriend, working in a hospital just across the border, says when people come in with trauma, bones sticking out and blood everywhere and their skull split open, they don’t even ask anymore. It’s always the motorcycle. A recent study found that 65% of motorcycle riders have been in a crash within the last year alone.

These young men sit in droves on these cheap Chinese thumpers and hiss in the shadows. Young girls walk long distances to school, and the boys whistle and pick them up. The girls typically cannot pay for the rides; a ride to school can cost more than an entire day’s wage, after all. And in the corn fields, indebted, in power, and hidden from accountability, sexual violence runs rampant. Here, teenage pregnancy is a huge problem. Girls drop out of school and concede to life as the second wife of a scummy man on a motorcycle.

Here, girls are more likely to contract HIV than to finish secondary school. It’s why WBR ensures that 70 percent of the bikes donated to schools go to girls. And of all the data WBR gets out of the schools, the drop in teenage pregnancy and the reduction in fear feels like the most consequential. Some 78 percent of students report feeling scared walking to school. When they have a bike—and independence from the motorcycles—and the ability to outrun a man, only nine percent report feeling unsafe. Only one or two percent progress seems like playing with house money at that point.

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Mama Josephine

Mama Josephine maintains that it is not hot as she wipes the gathering sweat off her brow. She’s used to it by now, 54 years in this furnace, thousands of days in this white sun fanning out across these fields. She bends down to thumb the soil. It is a decided motion made with grace, practiced and swift. The sweat falls to the dirt, soft and loose, a tangle of roots, a web of life. Here, the seedlings will grow, in this field behind her house. Then she will ride with them to the farm. Then, they will be sold as vines or grown into tubers. But the real money is in vines. She will work her fields, wash her potatoes, strap them to the rack, and ride to the market. It is a simple operation. But sometimes the most simple things are the most profound.

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Mama Josephine has been running these four farms for years now. After her husband had a stroke, she was forced into the role of the main breadwinner, tasked with helping her four children and nine grandchildren get through life. The church sent her to school in Zambia to learn to farm. Now, she’s working almost 10 acres.

Her husband eventually died in 2022. Earlier that year, World Bicycle Relief was developing its “mobilized community” model, where they focus their energy on several small areas to use them as models for others in the region. By doing more work in fewer places, they can clear the noise in the data and better attribute change to the undeniable power of the bicycle. Previously, they were working in seven counties, and now, in Kenya, they work mostly in two.

They’ve chosen Siaya and Kakamega counties—two poor and mostly rural counties, both troubled by unpredictable weather and meager soil—and split them into two. One half gets bikes; the other serves as a control. And to better pinpoint where the bikes should go, they partner with other organizations, ministries, and groups. The local Ministry of Education handles which schools get bikes, the school handles which students, and WBR handles the bikes. The Anglican Development Society, a collection of local churches working in agriculture (and the group that originally sent Mama Josephine to school), was chosen to help WBR find deserving farmers in the region. Naturally, they pointed her out as a good candidate for a bicycle.

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Mama Josephine straps her bag of potatoes to the rack and settles into her walk back up the hill. She waves to the kids. She buys some bananas from the neighbor. She points out a snake racing into the bushes. She does this ride several times a week, all the way to the other side of town, 25 kilometers each way, because there’s simply no more farmland near her home in Shianda. Population growth has squeezed everyone here closer together and made it much more difficult to find a viable plot of land. She never complains as we push back up the hill, the sweat pouring from her face, the 30 kilos of potatoes rustling under their own weight, also settling in for the ride. She rocks with the bike, not fighting it, but together they climb. A team, making a living, one potato at a time.

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“I have no problems now. The farm is my husband,” she tells me. She’s focused on the work, grinding, putting away money to ensure her family gets through school, and smiling along the way. I can’t stress enough how relatively expensive the motorcycles are here. Gas is almost $5 a gallon. In these two years, she’s saved $700 by not riding on the back of these things. With that savings, she’s been able to lease another plot of land, and with that income, she’ll be able to put her grandkids through secondary school. After seeing her husband die, she’s worried about her health and says she feels stronger now that she’s riding.

“The bike has really changed my lifestyle,” she promises me. Mama Josephine is a hustler, planting every square inch of her yard outside and recently leasing yet another plot of land on the other side of town. She has this radiating energy, this passion for life, this intensity to her being, this gratitude for existence. Her voice is deep, and her laugh is strong. She smiles a lot. She’s fun to be around.

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As we ride, Mama Josephine’s pace steady, a periodic break on the hills, schoolgirls flying down them on their own Buffalo bikes, boys pushing their Buffalo bikes loaded with Napier grass, parents and their bikes strapped with jugs of water—it feels like riding through a commercial. The kids always smile back. Everywhere, things are moving. It is central Amsterdam on a Monday afternoon, a dizzying mix of bells and freehubs. The mobilized community model is new, this big experiment another part of WBR’s laboratory in Kenya, and so far, the data is promising. School absenteeism is down 81 percent, vaccination rates are up, savings are up, the environmentalists get to plant more trees, people report more feelings of economic satisfaction, from 18 to 71 percent. Stable employment, sustainable transportation, independence from the predatory motorcycle riders, healthier people. The list is endless.

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This is their path forward. The WBR team is long past their phase of doubt and is very confident in what they and their bikes do. “We know the bike works, and we know that there’s still a need. Now, it’s all about scaling,” says Maureen. She was brought in as the new East African director to help them navigate this next phase, where they roll on the gas and shift into the next gear: one million bikes by 2025 and another million by 2030. These mobilized communities serve to demonstrate to potential partners the bicycle’s effectiveness as a simple fix in the overlooked problem of transportation.

To hit the numbers WBR is aiming for, they’re banking on partnering with other NGOs—AMREF, UNICEF, USAID, who knows, but it’ll come. Right now Johnson and Johnson is weighing buying 100,000 bikes to donate to community health promoters, but first, they’re giving out 3,000 to see the impacts on vaccination rates. And with both the increase in sales and working with new partners, WBR sees itself really making a difference. This is the gas pedal. And it is now firmly to the floor.

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Maureen

“This new strategy really speaks to me as a person,” Maureen says when I ask if WBR feels white-saviorist to her. But she says they’ve even changed the power dynamics with this recent change in strategy. Maureen says the countries now determine what they need, and the global team provides. They have all the power, and importantly, everyone who works here in Kenya was also born and raised here. Maureen, the Mombasa-born daughter of an oil executive, the strong talker, the pink acrylic nails tapping on the glass table, the snap of a joke, and a hearty laugh, says she worked in the corporate world after living in a gated community most of her life. After helping distribute handwashing stations during COVID she left her job as the regional director of a global logistics company.

She had 58 countries reporting to her. She made good money. She was successful. After she started at WBR, she still didn’t quite understand what it was all about. “‘It’s just a bicycle,’ I was saying. What all can it do?” But Maureen went to her first distribution, and it was her first time really in the rural parts of Kenya, 50 miles from a supermarket, no electricity, two stinking pit toilets and cracks down the chalkboard. “I didn’t know there was this need… and I didn’t know how much the bike meant to these kids until I saw it.”

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Now, Maureen is firm in her resolve, and she’s the most confident talker on the team. “No African woman should not have access to health because she cannot get transport to the health facility. And giving them that transport is truly profound. As an African woman, to me, that is very profound. We have the evidence that the bicycle is the solution. Now I need to convince partners so that we can scale it.” Listening to Maureen, I’m struck by her conviction. But I’m also still battling the why of this whole operation.

This is all so much work. They’ve mentioned aiming to change the development trajectory of Kenya. “That’s massive. Why do all this?” I ask. She doesn’t pause to think. She talks downhill with the determination of someone wielding a divine truth, like I’m missing the blinking light right in front of us both. “We all strive for greater things. For us, that means a greater impact. I could work anywhere if I wanted. But I choose to work here because I believe in this project, and I want to make a difference. This strategy offers me an opportunity. It resonates with me. I would like to be home on a Sunday, but instead I’m leaving after this whole week in the field and going straight to Uganda. They need me!”

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It’s a Friday afternoon, near the end of my visit, and I’m hanging around the warehouse in Kisumu. I talk to Patrick, the warehouse manager, and he jokes with me about how many Maasai wives I’ll leave Kenya with. Patrick graduated with a degree in logistics and worked for the Kenyan government helping distribute medicine before being recruited by the UN. He went to work in Somalia, where he directed the distribution of food and medicine to 28,000 troops scattered around the country during the height of the war with Al-Shabaab. Several of his colleagues were killed in the fight, and so Patrick left and joined WBR.

I tense as he mentions his professional proximity to one of the most brutal terrorist organizations in the world, and I think of the wars in the neighboring countries, Sudan especially getting worse by the day, and all the shocking imagery coming out of it. I look around at the piles of wheels being laced in the corner. A bin of handlebars. A bucket of chains. A bell dings. The compressor roars back to life. “Doesn’t this all feel a little trite compared to fighting Al-Shabaab?” I ask. To Patrick, it’s simple. “No. Not at all. Humanitarian work is all about helping people and affecting people’s lives. It’s all the same.”

The sun begins to set, and the rain clouds again begin to build. The afternoon chatter has gradually replaced the melodic ticking and whirring of ratchets and impact guns as the assembly workers move outside for more ginger tea. I walk aimlessly around the warehouse, pinching tires, squeezing brakes, ringing bells, and walking past row after row of bicycles. Fifty deep, two high, eight wide. Boxes of unbuilt bikes are stacked high on the opposite wall. Hundreds of them in total, all ready to be sold or donated to the next person in line.

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These shining and beautifully simple tools for empowerment are stacked and stickered and ready for another distribution on Tuesday. Another new school. Another 100 bikes, 100 students, 100 families whose trajectory can change all from this simple thing I all too often take for granted. The remarkable efficiency of two wheels with air in the tires. The trust you can outrun someone. The ability to go where you choose and take what you want with. Freedom, in all of its forms, is really all we’re chasing. What is life without it?

The guys are locking up. I walk past the filing cabinets, the rows of old prototypes tired and collapsed in the corner, the buckets of destroyed parts, past the banners and the map, past another 500 bikes, and I can’t help but think how this all could simply not have existed. This could have just been a nice idea, a conversation between two friends, another dream to be lost. This could just have been another empty warehouse. But here they are, 20 years, 800,000 bikes distributed later. Twenty-two countries. Infinite stories. Tangible, ephemeral, visceral goodness in this world.

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I step outside. The afternoon rain sears the burning blacktop. I sit down on the curb and pick at the callouses on my hands. I breathe in the damp air and feel this unavoidable and familiar feeling. I think of Mama Josephine. I think of Michael. I think of Joseph, of all the students, of everyone I’ve met. I begin to cry. I am once again overcome by the power of the bicycle. I am once again proud to be a human.

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