Andrew Han is a student at Colorado College who received a fellowship grant that is allowing him to spend a year traveling the world to visit bike projects like the one we support in Rwanda. We connected Andrew with a couple of our projects and we wanted to share his report from a recent visit to Learn Work Develop in Rwanda.
The report below is what Andrew sent us last month:
I had the pleasure to visit Learn, Work, Develop and see the impact that they're having on the ground in Rwanda! The bikes from Bikes for the World benefit LWD in many different ways. For one, they are used to train bike mechanics. Cycling in Rwanda is dominated by men, so to see all the girls and women training to become bike mechanics was especially touching. I was told that some of them even maintained bikes for the professionals when they came to Rwanda for the UCI World Championships in 2025.
LWD also has a youth cycling team, using bikes from Bikes for the World to provide access to youth sports. I was especially lucky to be in Rwanda during the Tour du Rwanda, Africa's most important cycling race. During the youth racing circuit, the LWD girls even won first place! To see her share the podium with the TdR winners was inspiring.
And finally they sell the bikes through a social enterprise and use the profit to fund their other program areas. I learned about their "Masenge Mba Hafi" model of community empowerment. They've been able to reduce teenage pregnancy rates in their operational areas by empowering peer educators and "aunties" who act like community stewards.
Rwanda is a beautiful country and LWD is doing amazing work to develop the country by harnessing the power of bikes to provide education and effective employment training.
So happy that Andrew reached out to us and to hear that he had a great visit to our partner in Rwanda It's great to get these first hand accounts that confirm exactly what we've shared about the programs we support. Last month he was visiting Nairobi with World Bicycle Relief who runs a bike project with a similar mission but a different model that provides new bikes to beneficiaries. And he will be in Sierra Leone as well to visit with our partner there Village Bicycle Project.