Bicycle Empowerment Centres

Our partner in Africa, Bicycle Empowerment Network Namibia, established the Bicycle Empowerment Centre model in 2005. Since then they have implemented 26 of these highly successful bike workshops in Namibia and Zambia.

Here’s how it works. One of the 20 Bicycles For Humanity chapters world wide collects and packs a forty foot shipping container with up to 400 bikes donated from their community. The B4H chapter also raises the funds to ship the container to Africa and provide other funds to help with the implementation costs.

BEN Namibia receives the container and implements it as a Bicycle Empowerment Centre - a self sustaining small business selling and servicing bikes. The shipping container is placed in a community, modified (windows, extra doors, often an extra roof for the heat) - BEN Namibia then train some of the community in bike mechanic and business skills. After the training period the BEC opens for business providing sustainable and affordable transport solutions to the local region and providing ongoing employment and business opportunities to the community. All of the experience in Africa and other developing countries points to the need for economic stimulus from the ground up as the way forward. The BEC model fits perfectly with all of this experience.

Many of the bikes are distributed to Home Based Care workers - health care volunteers working at the rock face of the HIV/AIDS response - others to orphans of that same crisis. Each BEC is attached to a beneficiary organisation - a development project that will further benefit the local region - and provides a proportion of the revenue to the beneficiary. These projects are often orphanages or HIV/AIDS outreach centres.

In this way the BEC model has ongoing, measurable and sustainable benefits. BEN Namibia monitors the BEC’s progress guiding them toward independence. In many cases the results have been far in excess of what could ever have been expected. The DEEP BEC in Oshikati recently opened a computer training centre in addition to its continuing bike workshop business.

In an area where stories of aid projects coming to nothing through either lack of stewardship or lack of understanding  abound - BEN’s BEC model just works. We can only do our work and accept the trust of our donors, volunteers and sponsors in the knowledge that their effort and involvement means something - that we are sure it makes a difference, the project is effectively implemented and that the benefits and results are observed.

The BEC provides for all of these needs and we are now hoping to establish similar models with new partners in the Asia/Pacific region.