When a bike becomes more than a bike. In the DMV, some of our donors use their bikes to run errands, take their kids to school, or to commute to work. Those are more often the exceptions to the rule, however. Many of the bikes donated to Bikes for the World are solely used for exercise. While our partners around the world also use our donated bikes for exercise the majority of them are using them for a main source of transportation.
More importantly, our donated bikes are being used by our partner organizations to further their work in many other areas of need within their rural communities. Those areas range from healthcare needs, education, poverty, career building, capital generating, hunger, etc.One of the main criteria we look for when choosing a partner is the sustainability of that program. In addition to providing bikes for critical transportation needs we also hope to create jobs and opportunities to help improve local communities.
In Costa Rica we work with MiBici, an extension of the larger organization FINCA which sets up small co-ops throughout the country. Working with community members, FINCA helps establish microfinance entities that work within their own communities to generate, build, and loan money to improve the lives within the co-op.
There are many benefits to establishing these microfinance opportunities in rural villages. They encourage small business growth and promote unique entrepreneurship. They often give women an opportunity to start or grow their businesses. And they almost always give everyone the ability to take out loans outside the restrictions from larger banking institutions.
Our bikes help build that capital within those small communities throughout Costa Rica. Once the co-ops receive the bikes from a shipment, they repair and sell them to create funds to support the loans issued within the community. In this way our bikes help boost businesses unrelated to bikes, like Baby Sloth.
The FINCA Foundation looks for positive impacts in low economic growth regions, like that in the northwest. Back in 2020 they identified a distinct cacao that lost its genetic characteristics through regular post-harvest processing. A post-harvest center was established in the region to help farmers increase the quality of their yield. They took fresh cacao and gave it the best possible fermentation and drying process to enhance the organoleptic characteristics of the quality varieties that were already there. Baby Sloth coffee was born
Today there are more than 100 producers and little by little they are moving from selling dry cacao to brokers in Costa Rica to direct export, thus being able to recognize a "Premium" for producers when the world market allows it. Public-private projects have also been promoted that benefit the most active producers in the project with training and delivery of supplies for their farms.
Baby Sloth is just one of the many companies created through collaboration and entrepreneurship. While it is one of the bigger ones, your old bikes are also promoting smaller businesses like tailoring shops, food stalls, handicrafts, and farming.