In rural Kenya and Uganda, the entrepreneurial spirit is strong but just one thing stands in the way of many Africans — lack of transport. Buying a car is not an option for most, and many must walk to work, walk to school, and even walk to the health clinic when they are sick. Lack of transport can be a matter of life and death in Africa since many people suffering illness or accidents cannot make it to hospitals or health clinics. A company called CooP-Africa started a bicycle workshop that is addressing three critical issues — jobs, health and transport — and changing lives by making bicycle ambulances.
The Green Hub bicycle workshop in Kisumu, Kenya has been making bicycles for the Bike4Care initiative since 2015. In 2016, they opened a workshop in Jinja, Uganda. They make bicycles that the firm then sells to healthcare workers in the area. The workers buy the bicycles and pay them off in installments with the money they earn using the bicycles as ambulances.
The initiative has provided extra work for over 700 community health workers. Not all health workers can find full-time work at a hospital or clinic. On top of that, most people living in rural Kenya do not have access to a car to go to a clinic. The Green Hub initiative is solving multiple problems by enabling trained health workers who have access to a bicycle to travel to people in need of medical assistance.
The Bike4Care currently has over 30 active bicycle ambulances. The program has enabled nearly twice as many house calls to be made, and some of those visits saved the lives of people who were in critical condition. An estimated 250,000 people have better access to health care because of the initiative.
Trained healthcare workers who are involved in Bike4Care have an additional way to make income — selling health care products. This is a fairly new addition to the program. Health workers have sold water purification tablets and filters, mosquito nets and solar lights. Through Bike4Care, health workers report being able to visit twice as many homes in a day than when they go on foot.
If health workers participating in the project continue to bring in revenue at the rate at which they are, then Bike4Care should be able to make 1,250 new bicycles within the next 1.5 years which would generate more jobs.
Green Hub’s workshop makes bicycles for initiatives other than the healthcare industry. Many students in Kenya and Uganda live too far from school to travel back and forth every night, which results in them having to pay high fees to sleep on campus. Bike4School lets students rent bicycles for a small fee per term, so they can not only go home and be with their families at night but stop paying the high price to stay on campus.
Green Hub is also behind Bike4Work, which rents bicycles to local entrepreneurs or those who make money selling a product. One farmer and trader in Kenya used to walk over two miles to her nearest market to sell produce. Now she uses a bicycle through Bike4Work to travel to a market further away where she can earn more money. Other entrepreneurs in the program include bicycle taxi drivers, street vendors, and waste collectors. Juice delivery is one entrepreneurial endeavor that’s made great use of the bike program in Kenya.
Because of its successful initiatives including Bike4Work, Bike4Care, and Bike4School, the Green Hub bicycle workshop needs to produce and repair a lot of bikes. Anyone with bicycle repair skills — from students to entrepreneurs — can earn extra income fixing bicycles for the for-profit group.