The Power of Bicycles | F.K. Day | TEDxMidAtlantic

we have any cyclists out there in the audience raise your hand Oh what it is that is excellent well I hope after you I tell you the story you'll never look at bicycles the same again my brother and I and some friends started a company 30 years ago to design and manufacture high-performance bicycle components most of our products were four racers and for fitness and sport and at that time I thought I knew a lot about bicycles and the power of bicycles and all that they could deliver it turns out I missed a very important part I missed the basic concept of transportation here's what I mean if I went around the room and asked you what was your transportation story last week this is probably what I'd hear I walked to work I rode my bike I drove my car I took a bus a train a tram my flightless was delayed I got harassed to TSA that would be your transportation story if I was to ask the same question in rural Africa the story would be about walking it would be about racing the Sun from sunup to sundown trying to get what you needed to do in that day complete every step a race to overcome the barrier of distance before the darkness of night we really did learn about this about 13 years ago immediately following the Indian Ocean tsunami like you many of us were watching this disaster unfold on television and it was horrible and we thought to ourselves oh my gosh how will we respond as a family we thought well maybe we could raise funds and send it to the Red Cross but then as a company and a family we said you know what maybe what we could do is leverage our experience in the bicycle industry and deliver a large-scale bicycle program to help people faces could get moving again back in back into transportation so we took that idea and we called all of the relief organizations in the US and we said hey what do you think about a large-scale bicycle program to mobilize all these people who had lost so much and all of them said no no no just send us your money well that didn't make sense to me so my wife Liam it's bat day and a photographer we flew to Indonesia and Sri Lanka and began interviewing communities and relief organizations on the ground and we asked them the same question what do you think about a large-scale bicycle program and the response was the complete opposite they said you can do a large-scale program with bicycles that would be fantastic so along with Liam and our company and with the support of the bicycle industry we worked with local NGOs and communities and we delivered 24,000 locally sourced bicycles to those people to those people who had lost so much the impact was deep and immediate I remember being with Leah in Sri Lanka and she was gathering photography and stories from one of the relocation camps it was many miles away from when people from where people used to live and a man was riding out of that camp with his daughter and they were going to the clinic because his daughter was sick and then they were going to go to the marketplace the distance would have been about 10 miles and would have taken him about four hours and would have exhausted the child if they were walking along the way when they received a bicycle they were able to complete that trip in one hour and the man was able to carry the daughter all the way the beauty of that is that wherever a bicycle was delivered the exact same transformation occurred is boost in productivity and efficiency this ability to use your transportation to regain your livelihood and your jobs your clinics so we hired an outside organization to measure the impact you know what what is this done what is the return on investment and the results were that there was deep and immediate impact in the areas of healthcare education and economic development we published the report our job was done and we were going to go back and keep designing for the top end of the market for racers and enthusiasts around the world as we were wrapping up an individual from one of the relief organizations came to us and said you know the work you've done here is truly impactful but do you realize the same number of people that died in tsunami which is about 230,000 die every two weeks in Africa from hunger and preventable disease you have to scale this bicycle program up in Africa well that hadn't been our plan but you actually can't turn your back on a comment like that particularly with the results that we saw so we challenged ourselves and said okay let's scale up in Africa and we'll kind of do it like a business we'll focus in on the three key areas of impact health care education and economic development well isolate those will measure them carefully and publish the results so we researched a bunch in Africa and we chose a large scale healthcare initiative that was going on in Zambia it was a consortium of well-known relief organizations addressing the devastation caused by HIV and AIDS what they were going to try to do is train the villages how to take better care of themselves so they would train village health care workers to go back into their villages and teach about prevention and testing and then how to care for the sick and the dying they trained 23,000 workers and sent them out and they're Zambia walking for those of you familiar with Zambia Zambia is about the size of Texas with half the population there's a whole lot of distance between everything homes villages towns what they found is that the trained healthcare workers wasted so much time walking that the program began to suffer there were huge inconsistencies in the care the caseloads weren't being taken care of but even worse the volunteers were beginning to drop out of the program they were poor as well and they had to take care of their families and if they had to walk for hours and hours they couldn't take care of their families it was terrible so we came alongside of them we said okay we'll deliver 23,000 bikes and we will mobilize your demoralized army and we will get them back on the roads so that shouldn't have been a problem so we said okay well Ripa will replicate exactly what we did in Sri Lanka which is we identified all the local sources of bikes we strengthened them and then we delivered them into the field so we lived in this am BA at all the sources of bicycles and we took them and we tested them out out in the communities and what we found is that all of them began to fail immediately pedals broke off crank arms bent wheels collapsed they couldn't be used for this program it was a disaster we had been way overconfident we affectionately called those bikes B SOS for bicycle shaped objects we had to go back to our NGO partners the ones that were dependent on us to deliver transportation to kind of salvage their program and we have to go back to them and say if we followed through with this bike program it would fail we need time to fix the supply chain well we went to all of the suppliers and of course none of them thought that their bikes were breaking which is another classic example of the poor have no voice and they get dumped on all the time but there was one of them that said oh we had no idea our bikes were breaking can you help us fix them well that we can do that we know something about so he worked very closely with them to improve their bikes in their supply chain and then we began delivering bikes into the healthcare initiative Royce is one of the health care workers and she also was suffering from long distance to walk but when she received the bike it was like turbocharging and Angel she was able to visit more patients more frequently and spend more time she was able to leverage the teaching and the training that the NGOs had given her and helped spread it out throughout her communities and when she wasn't working on health care for the communities she was able to use the bike to assist her family we found that our research said that she was able to go four times further which means visiting more distant patients and also visiting twice as many patients that program went from suffering to conceivably failing to becoming one of the leading programs and service of HIV and AIDS so we thought okay we ended up delivering about a hundred and sixty thousand bikes into healthcare initiatives in about eighteen countries and we saw very similar results we saw very similar results and we're not done yet but with the healthcare initiative going we turned our attention to education remember we're working on the three key findings that we found in Sri Lanka in Sri Lanka we found that when the students that had been displaced into distant camps received a bicycle they began to return to school immediately our research in Zambia said that distance was a huge barrier to keeping kids in school and that if we applied the same concept we would see the same results in in Zambia many parts of Africa the tradition is for the girls students to do all the chores at home that includes cleaning cooking fetching water caring for younger siblings so the dropout rate for girls was much higher so we worked very closely with the Zambian Ministry of Education we and the communities and we designed a program that would provide bikes to students on a studied own program if they stayed in school they would earn the bike after two years and that began to regenerate this incredible transportation that was missing in connecting students to schools ethel is a student she's a high school student who lives about four hours round-trip to school she has dreams of becoming a nurse she's good in science she's good in math but the distance to her school is likely going to crush those dreams when she received a bike she immediately was able to get to school on time use the bike to help her face Emily and ensure that she had a chance to get to those dreams that she cared so deeply about today we've delivered over a hundred and fifty thousand bikes into education initiatives like the one that Ethel was part of we've seen a over a twenty five percent increase in attendance and over a 55 percent increase in performance who wouldn't want to try that with our teenager at home huh the consistency in the impact is so great that we begin to funnel or focus all of our philanthropic work into the area of education and the results again are off the charts and it's very easy to scale but there's a really interesting thing one thing I've noticed is that philanthropy will help people stuck in poverty but it won't get them out economics will what we found is that whenever we delivered a philanthropic program people in the communities would come to us and want to buy the bicycles these would be entrepreneurs farmers people like Georgina here who had long long distances to travel and they needed basic transportation that they had no choice other than walking so we fund we founded a for-profit so the not-for-profit founder the for-profit to serve those under underserved people and it's a wholly owned for profit so now the not-for-profit has this great revenue stream and the beauty is is that it's beginning to deliver bikes much further afield that we could ever do philanthropically so the way I look at it the philanthropic programs are pioneering programs of excellence and giving examples to other people in other corporations where great impact can be had with basic transportation I believe that if we look at sub-sahara Africa and there are about a billion people depending on who you ask living in sub-saharan Africa over 600 million of them are living in the rural context where walking is their primary mode of transportation imagine the possibility of mobilizing those individuals imagine the possibility of them caring for their villages them caring for their education them carrying for their commerce release them from that bondage of distance that they face every day that consumed so many of their daylight hours release them through the power of bikes we're beginning to do that and generate the data to back it up and my hope is that at some point we'll be able to get enough people to copy us the transportation will never be a barrier so those people in rural Africa again I look at the possibility of transportation I think to myself that we have so many options that we've forgotten about its importance today you'll leave here and choose many modes of transportation to get home but the people in rural Africa don't have those transportation choices I look at my life and I go we all have a transportation story mine I'm thankful that I can live a life of impact to the service of others bringing voice to the poorest people that have the biggest problem with transportation and bringing the bike industry to bear into that I've spent most of my life designing and manufacturing high-performance bicycle components but I think the most powerful bicycle I've ever seen is one in the hands of a woman building her business in fighting to gain new markets or one in the hands of the school girl fighting for education thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 97,796

Rating: 4.9466667 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Global Issues, Africa, Developing World, Development, Education, Global issues, Health, Poverty, Transportation

Id: iqCzkjOH_sE

Length: 15min 23sec (923 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 24 2018