Custom built bicycle by World Bicycle Relief NGO which provides Bicycles to underdeveloped, mostly rural, areas
More to be found at https://worldbicyclerelief.org
I'm too cynical to advocate for or against the NGO itself on account of not having researched it enough, It's founded by the SRAM owners (that being a bicycle parts corporation) and they have a for-profit subsidiary which just sells you that bike, but they claim some of it goes towards the actual charity. Seems an ok model.
But the idea seems, genuinely, pretty good. You give someone a rugged-ass bicycle that can be fixed via local parts instead of some dependance on anything else, they now have a pretty good bicycle and boy does that beat walking. Forgive me the obvious bias here but it feels, at least theoretically, pretty Sankara-esque, it's just instead of a tractor, it's a bicycle. Different use-case, same philosophy.
Especially that 100kg carry capacity rear rack, I mean goddamn. Most "adventure" bikes you can customer purchase in the west end at around 40 - 50kg on that front. Kind of want one now.
According to their own numbers they've given out 752.000 bicycles at about 150€ a pop.
EDIT: It also comes very close to the Apocalypse Bicycle that I posted about as the Humanitarian Bicycle idea about 2 years ago and that was from some guy just designing it for fun
What do we think?
oh my god white people are something else
yes, hypothetically we could send impoverished black people in the third world who have practically no carbon footprint whatever random rusted old bikes with no parts standardization instead of doing anything to reduce our own massive consumption of fossil fuels. what the fuck would it accomplish? do you think the low cost steel bicycles they might pedal around are meaningfully contributing to climate change? is it just fun to deprive others of things hypothetically? is it a ritual?
where do these ideas and thoughts come from? how do they enter your mind and why does no critical kind of process happen? why do I encounter them?