The Cycle for Health Initiative
Imagine it’s the middle of the night and your loved one is coming down with a horrible fever. What started as a cough and chills is now an emergency situation. If you’re living in North America, you jump in a car or call an ambulance to reach an emergency room in minutes.
If you’re living in a rural area of East Africa, the story will play out very differently. In the middle of the night, in a developing rural community, there is no ambulance to call. There is no car readily available to pick you up. The roads are so rocky and filled with potholes that venturing out at night would be dangerous. So the next day you collect emergency resources to finance a trip to a regional hospital. You arrive at the hospital with no idea how long or how much the treatment is going to cost.
Walk through a regional hospital in East Africa and when you observe the hallways, filled with families spending nights waiting for treatment for loved ones and you’ll realize that there is a story not reaching the nightly news or mainstream media. While stories of poverty, starvation and disease are plenty in Western media, there is a root cause of suffering being overlooked; a lack of transportation. Without the proper transport, patients cannot reach the doctors, and doctors cannot reach the patients.
The Cycle for Health Initiative is a campaign to improve the mobility of medical personnel and resources with recycled bicycles. Two Wheeled Foundation helps community based African organizations utilize recycled bicycles to mobilize medical resources by providing community health care workers with medical bicycles, producing bicycle ambulances and goods carriers to improve access for non-able bodied patients.
Two Wheeled Foundation is looking for dedicated partners to become part of the Cycle for Health Initiative. Send an inquiry to cycleforhealth@twowheeledfoundation.org to learn more.