Qhubeka Bikes for Life

This is a photo of my Qhubeka bike. It is almost permanently parked in my office - except when it's being used on a coffee run - where it serves as a great conversation starter.

Perhaps it doesn't look like much, being a durable, low maintenance, all-steel, single-speed, coaster brake machine, but to many people in the poorer communities, it changes lives daily.

In most rural communities, the distances to services of almost any kind are vast, be they schools, clinics, general dealers, or even friends and family. Introducing these bicycles into rural communities changes everything. Suddenly the walk to school, that may have taken hours, now takes minutes for the kids. A visit to the clinic can now possibly be considered with more ease, and the weekly visit to the nearest general dealer by dad now becomes something more of a pleasure, given the steel bicycle rack, which can carry a lot more, with more ease, than a plastic bag could.

How does it work? Well, businesses sponsor money to a trust, which then pays for the manufacture and distribution of these Qhubeka bicycles into selected communities. But there's more. Anyone in the community planting 150 seedlings, an activity which is carefully recorded, earns you a bicycle. So not only does the presence of bicycles significantly enhance the productivity of the community, significant community greening is also an outcome of this initiative.

Besides community development and greening as per the above, there is also a small enterprise development context to the initiative in that hundreds of bicycle mechanics are trained in order to be able to support and repair the bicycles within the communities.

All said, it's a great initiative which I am proud to be associated with in my own small way.

So, what did I mean by 'conversation starter' in my opening paragraph? Well, for every senior executive that comes to my office, the presence of the bicycle gives me an excuse to tell them the Qhubeka story, which may one day result in someone else enthusiastically taking up the challenge to spread the word of this life changing initiative.