The Coordinator of Bicycle Sponsorship Project & Workshop Richard Kisamadu is writing:

I am referring to Indian bikes common all over East Africa. The different brands (eg. Hero, Roadmaster, Jupiter, Raleigh) don´t differ in the shape of the parts much, so spare-parts are no problem. They are the heavy-duty english roadster-type.

At 130$ we can organise the purcharse, assembling and distribution of the bike to a rural cooperative according to modes the project has developed. The running of the project (payment of the assemblers, a book-keeper, the manager and the running costs of the w.shop are included).

The project has found, that is is nonsense to give out the bikes at nothing, so the recipients are to give up to hals the market price for a bike, accoring to what they can afford.

So you can see, that a donation for a full bike here nearly enables us to give out two, calculating the own share of the people who receive.

The project is well known all over Uganda in the meantime and the applications are much more than we can supply, of course.

The special clue: the donors here in Europe receive letter from the recipient of the bike after a while. So they really know, where their money went and what it was used for.

All in all we have financed 5.500 bikes here, we just buy them from the local importers and we try to buy full containers of 450 bikes at one go to get a good price.

We have not set up a credit-scheme, even if some of the official donors wanted us to. But we still think, that the administrational work would be too much compared to the effects you have from it.

It makes more sense to let the people pay at one go (maybe a little less) and then they are free to set up something with their bike, e.g. an income-generating activity. And our experiences show, that it works that way.

Right now we are forced to let a credit scheme run for appr. 100 given-out bikes as our official donor wants it. We are lucky and have an expert who will evaluate the scheme. So we will see, what will be the result.

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