Changing Gears
- Posted by: Zach Dundas
- on August 9, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Imagine walking two miles over rough clay roads, lugging 300 pounds of coffee beans to a processing station. The faster you get the harvest in, the fresher the beans are and the more money you’ll make. And since you make about $400 a year, money is an issue.
This is the challenge faced by Rwanda’s coffee farmers, and a new U.S. nonprofit thinks it has devised a brilliantly simple solution: the wheel.
This spring, Bikes to Rwanda, an organization spun off from the Portland roaster Stumptown Coffee, dropped 400 enormous mountain bikes at Rwanda’s Koakaka Karaba cooperative, one of Stumptown’s suppliers. The bikes are not sleek urban cruisers. Featuring a huge, bridge-like rack and a latticework of braces for innumerable strapping and lashing options, the chunky warhorse design provides a smooth (if slow) ride, and makes it tough to fall even with that 300-pound load.
Bikes to Rwanda is fundraising for future shipments (Rwandans help cover the cost by paying $120 worth of beans for one bike)—but is also monitoring its first delivery to see how they are used in the field. “We tend to assume a lot about developing countries,” says BTR’s Clara Seasholtz. “This is like any other tool. They’ll figure out ways to use them we could never imagine.”
VIDEO Bikes to Rwanda
LEARN MORE bikestorwanda.com
DISCUSSION: 1 Comment
Ok, so they are ‘fundraising for future shipments’. It is probably safe to say that not everyone has one of these bikes. Well, what about those coffee pickers that don’t have bikes? How do you think they feel? American’s only think about the dollars and nothing else. Sure ‘with bikes’ they could double their income, but how does that make up for someone getting their heads bashed in for one of these bikes? Or go ahead and consider the whole economics of the story – if the processing station now gets more beans than it can process, what do you think the price is going to do? Think about “supply and demand”. Finally, if the price paid drops, AND you don’t have a bike, the you are doubly screwed. This has a good chance of making peoples lives much worse!