Pedals for Progress

Contact: Keith Oberg
Pedals for Progress
 
Pedals for Progress

Pedals for Progress (PfP) collects used bicycles from the public, adds new spare parts and accessories provided by the bike industry, and donates the combined product to selected non-profit partner agencies in developing countries. Since 1991 Pedals for Progress has donated 60,000 bicycles and US$8 million in parts to more than 20 overseas partners in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Eastern Europe, and the South Pacific. Receiving partners hire and train local people to recondition bikes, directly generating employment and job skills. Subsequently, partners sell the reconditioned bikes at modest cost, generating funds to pay local expenses and the costs of a subsequent shipment, and better ensuring that distributed bikes are used productively, to do work, get to work, access school, etc.

Pedals for Progress involves the public and civil society actors at both ends, enlisting more than 300 U.S. faith communities, service organizations, schools, businesses, and solid waste authorities to collect, compact, and ship the bicycles, while responding to initiatives and proposals of diverse partner agencies in developing countries, including programs in vocational education, microenterprise development, adult literacy, community preventive health services, and youth recreation.

Pedals for Progress represents a transferable model for assisting communities overseas, and has been replicated or had its methodologies adopted in other donor countries including Canada, Australia, and Ireland. Similar organizations have independently arisen in the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and elsewhere in the United States, but without the same degree of success and scale as Pedals for Progress.

The long-term experience in communities as diverse as Rivas, Jinotepe, and Masaya, Nicaragua; Ada, Ghana; El Progreso, Honduras; and Bridgetown, Barbados, among others, testifies to the growing impact of Pedals for Progress donations. Currently there are ten financially sustainable programs receiving Pedals for Progress support, in Barbados, El Salvador, Ghana (3), Guatemala, Honduras (2), Nicaragua, and Panama, with new programs recently or likely soon to be initiated in Colombia, Ecuador, Moldova, and the Solomon Islands.