Riders for Health

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Riders for Health is an international non-profit organization that is providing health-care to rural African villages using motorcycles. By providing health-care door-to-door, the organization is hoping to help fight the spread of AIDS. The project has resulted in reducing the disease and illnesses by getting patients much-needed medicine.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] History

Riders for Health was the brainchild of Barry Coleman and Andrea Coleman, a British husband-and-wife team with nonmedical résumés. Barry worked as a correspondent and feature writer for The Guardian newspaper in Britain. Andrea was a professional rider for five years. In 1986, with the help of racing legend Randy Mamola, they contacted the representatives of Save the Children, who told them that one of the biggest problems they had in getting the children immunized was reaching the ones in remote villages. The Colemans went to Africa and saw the woeful state of the roads. They also noticed a lot of abandoned motorbikes, left by the earlier aid workers, that needed repair. Motorcyles are well-suited for harsh African landscape, where roads are often busted, rutted or simply nonexistent. With the help of Save the Children, the local governments and money raised at bike rallies in England, they setup pilot programs in Uganda and Gambia, and helped acquire motorcycles and train riders and technicians. They built a fleet of 47 bikes in Lesotho that delivered health-care services from 1991 to 1996 without a breakdown. At the end of that period, Riders for Health became an independent organization and had expanded into Ghana, Zimbabwe and Nigeria. They have since diversified its fleet to include refrigerated trucks, minivans and ambulances and introduced a motorcycle-and-sidecar combination called the Uhuro that can be used as a mini-ambulance and double as a water pump when the bike is stationary. The UK offices are based in Daventry, Northamptonshire. There are also many offices worldwide.