/ 10 June 2011

Rural bicycle roll-out on track

Rural Bicycle Roll Out On Track

You may have heard of a million RDP houses or even a million jobs, but what about a million bicycles?

The government is involved in a programme to roll out 1-million bicycles, primarily to make it easier for learners to get to school. At R1 500 a bike, that is a potential investment of R1.5-billion to make the country’s youth more mobile.

The bulk of learners walk long distances to school, either because there is no available public transport or because they cannot afford it. The Shova Kalula (pedal easy) project, a department of transport initiative, is supplying bicycles to some children in rural, semi-rural and peri-urban areas who walk more than 3km to get to school.

James Salmon, the principal at Protea Primary in Napier in the Western Cape, said five learners at his school received bikes last year. When learners live far from school, the weather has a major impact on their ability to get to school, he said. “They used to come in very wet sometimes. But now the bikes have definitely improved their school attendance.”

Deslin Appollis, the Shova Kalula representative at Albert Myburgh Secondary in nearby Bredasdorp, said more than 50 bikes were used by the learners in that rural area. They left the bikes at a secure farm near a bus pick-up point. Appollis asked the learners to write letters explaining the influence the bicycles have had on their lives. “One learner said he was grateful because he used to leave his house at 5am to get to the bus stop at 7am. But now he leaves at 6.30am.”

During the demonstration phase of the project, which ended in 2006, 27 000 bikes were distributed and in the roll-out phase, which started in 2008, about 41 100 bicycles were distributed in all the provinces. To date 69 000 bicycles have been distributed. In 2006, the minister of transport and MECs took a decision that the provinces would allocate R5-million a year in the medium-term expenditure cycle to roll-out 1-million bicycles.

“The schools that benefited from the project were identified by the municipalities in conjunction with the department of education,” the transport department said. “Once a school is identified, learners who walk long distances are selected based on the selection criteria developed by the department.” But the project, which is also looking at providing bicycles to farmworkers and rural women, has hit a few bumps along the road.

Desmond Davids, the principal of Protem Primary near Swellendam, said that. Although his learners needed bikes, there was nowhere to store them near a bus pick-up point. Johanna Hendricks at Weltevrede Primary near Barrydale said that the 11 bikes that were delivered last year were still in the storeroom because the children were too small to ride them.

The Bicycling Empowerment Network (BEN) in the Western Cape is one of the non-governmental organisations called on by the government in 2005 to get involved in the distribution of the Shova Kalula bikes. Andrew Wheeldon, the managing director, said: “It is terrible to let [children who are too small to ride the bikes] continue to walk that distance to school. But they don’t fit the bikes and it is just not safe.”

BEN promotes cycling as a way to address problems of mobility linked to poverty. It imports used bicycles from Europe and distributes them to low-income areas, trains recipients of the bikes in safety and maintenance and establishes bicycle empowerment centres.

Wheeldon’s team gives children a day of training during which they are taught how to assemble the basic parts of the bike and perform simple repairs. They also undergo a rigorous safety training course. The state’s initial aim was to distribute 1-million bikes by 2011, but teething problems have significantly delayed the process.

In 2009, the recession led to budget cuts and skills-training programmes were no longer funded. Teachers and principals found it difficult to take the initiative further without the training and BEN struggles to provide it without funding. “We’ve had school principles phone to complain that they will not allow the children on the bikes until we have come to do the safety training,” said Wheeldon.

Abe de Jager, the national sales director of Thokomala mobility services, which is responsible for supplying bikes, said skills training added to the overall cost of the product. The heavy-duty bikes, he said, were sent off “ready to ride” with helmets and user manuals.

They were used in deep rural areas and had to be robust. Learners in those places might not be able to repair the bikes easily or might not have easy access to a service shop so they had to last, he said. The components were imported from China and the bicycles were assembled locally.

“In South Africa, there is not one company that manufactures bicycles,” De Jager said. “The decision to import is volume based. If the volumes were big enough, we would certainly consider manufacturing locally.” Thokomala produces about 20 000 bicycles a year and employs a staff of 62. But De Jager said that for local production to be viable, about 50 000 would have to be made a year.

Wheeldon said a parliamentary committee recently looked at the success rate of projects like Shova Kalula and recommended that the bikes be manufactured locally as vast amounts of money were spent on ordering the parts from Asia. “But it’s not a quick fix thing to look at today,” Wheeldon said.

“There is so much involved in setting up a factory; I think it should be left until a later stage.” Other countries have had to close bicycle factories because they could not compete with China, which supplies 70% of the world’s bicycle parts, he said. “Shova Kalula really is a wonderful programme. But changes need to be addressed in a strategic way,” said Wheeldon.