Today we would like to tell you about the great work that our friends at Bicycles Without Borders in collaboration with other entities, companies and organizations, in favor of improving the quality of life of people without resources, through bicycles.
Bicycles Without Borders is a non-profit social project promoted by The Utopia Foundation. A foundation, born from collaboration in international cooperation projects between the Educational Platform Foundation and Cultural Project Association El Sitio de Guatemala, dedicating itself to culture and sustainable human development, through creativity and social innovation.
From the Utopia Foundation, programs and projects are promoted within the field of direct cooperation on the ground, joining forces when it comes to changing an economic and social reality that is unsustainable and unfair for many.
The areas where the Foundation intervenes on a priority basis are:
Central America, the Mediterranean Basin and Senegal, seeking to empower, train and collaborate with different groups of people of different nationalities, contributing their grain of sand to the improvement of said territories.
Within this framework there is Bicycles Without Borders, a project whose main objective is to improve the living conditions of people without resources through the delivery of bicycles, facilitating their access to education, work and mobility in general.
Most of the bicycles that are delivered are donations that, prior to delivery, are inspected and repaired in job placement workshops, in turn generating jobs for people at risk of social exclusion.
Bicycles for Education in Palmarin, Senegal
One of the initiatives that Bicycles Without Borders is currently working on is located in Senegal, specifically in the Palmarin region.
El project, called Bicycles for Education in Palmarin, is being carried out jointly with the rural community of the area, at the time of facilitate access to education for students of the Palmarin-Facao Institute, in turn creating jobs for the maintenance and tuning of the delivered bicycles.
In November 2015, the first 65 bicycles were delivered to the students of the institute, in February 35 more were delivered and on March 23, the largest delivery was made with a total of 180 bicycles. In 2017, 150 new bikes arrived, starting 2018 with a fleet of more than 420 bicycles. Each bike is numbered and assigned to a student throughout the school year. With these deliveries, more than 400 students of the institute can travel by bike the distance of between 5 and 12 kilometers that separates the center from their homes
So that the bicycles can always be ready, a workshop has been set up to repair them by hiring a mechanic from the area. The poor condition of the track that connects the different towns of the rural community of Palmarin, together with the climate of the area – very sunny and with a lot of dust from the east wind or armatan –, added to the fact that the children of the area They are not used to using bicycles correctly, making maintenance difficult and showing wear and tear on the bikes in a short time. Therefore, to guarantee good operation for as long as possible, continuous maintenance must be carried out by a mechanic, since this task is difficult for students to undertake, because they do not have the knowledge or the necessary tools to do so. .
A bike rack has also been built at the institute so that students can park their bicycles correctly, taking care of the material delivered as much as possible.
2018 Objective: Construction of a hangar
Once classes end, the bikes must be stored in a safe place until the next course. Due to the large number of bicycles, there is a need to build a hangar to store the bicycles during the festive period, thinking about their safety and maintenance. It must be taken into account that the temperatures in the area are very high and some of the material on the bikes can be damaged if they are not covered. Currently, the bicycles are stored in two of the institute's classes due to the lack of a hangar.
At Bikefriendly we are very proud to be able to say that we are going to finance the start-up of a hangar for around 500 bicycles that will be built between the months of November and December 2018.
Many know us for the Quality Seal for tourist accommodation, through which we help them implement a space specially designed for cyclists in the hotel. Well, we are going to do the same thing in Palmarin. The construction of a BIKEFRIENDLY SPACE especially designed for the kids of the Palmarin-Facao institute. A space where you can store your bikes, keeping them safe for a long time 🙂
