Bicycle Partnership Program

First bicycle micro finance meeting, 12-14 April 2007 Koudougou (Burkina Faso)
The first meeting of African bicycle micro finance organisations took place from 12 to 14 April 2007 in Koudougou (Burkina Faso). The meeting was organised by Cycling out of Poverty, a Dutch fundraising organisation organising finances for bicycle micro finance projects in Africa. Participants were mainly partners of Cycling out of poverty: AVO (Burkina Faso), FABIO (Uganda), AAMTC (Ghana) and NHASD (Egypt).

The primary speaker at the training was Patrick Kayemba of FABIO Uganda. Fabio already started with bicycle microfinance projects in 1990, and has already provided over 15,000 people with a bicycle.

The idea of microfinance is that people can pay off their bicycle in instalments. The bicycle is given out during the period of payments. That way they can already use the bicycle to generate extra income and pay of the remaining instalments. With the repayed instalments, the CSOs can buy new bicycles for new beneficiaries.

But what happens if someone doesn't have the funds to pay of the instalments? And what price should the organsations use as total price for the bicycle? Market price? Or above market price to cover administration cost, necesary to be sustainable but it makes bicycles out of reach of the very poor? Or below market price to make the bicycle more accessible for the very poor, but resulting in financial problems for the organisation. These and other challenges were discussed during the meeting.