In luxury travel circles, biking is often referred to as the new golf. But in many developing countries, bikes provide a more basic bridge out of poverty.
Abercrombie & Kent Philanthropy has found a way to merge the two, joining with a small group of tourism, adventure travel and biking clubs to ship used bicycles to rural African and Jordanian communities.
The programs go far beyond providing simple — but very important — transportation to help residents get to school, work or health care. They also help the villagers near destinations like Victoria Falls in Zambia and the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest gorilla habitat in Uganda to set up bike sales and repair shops that also offer bicycle tours that would be hard to beat on that increasingly important "local experience" luxury scorecard.
"The real nice connectivity back to travel and tourism is the opportunity to experience the destination with someone on such an authentic level," Keith Sproule, executive director of A&K Philanthropy, said of the chance to ride through an African village with one of the locals and seeing not only the destination but also the changes such programs can make for the long term.
"I don't like philanthropy that just airdrops a bunch of stuff. It's not sustainable," Sproule said. He feels the same about the whole "pack for a purpose," where people "buy a bunch of crap from Wal-Mart to randomly distribute. Just because you think a kid might need a pencil, none of that ever changes a life. It also damages the host community because they start to look at visitors as someone who are going to hand them something."
The A&K program builds on initiatives like Wheels of Change, which was established in 2010 by Dan Austin of Austin Adventures, who Sproule said he met while living in Africa before he joined A&K Philanthropy two-and-a-half years ago.
The first A&K bike programs, all in Africa, focused strictly on setting up businesses for women, with an emphasis on teaching them the importance of knowing how to budget and save enough to not only cover licensing fees, taxes and insurance but also to pay the costs for shipping new containers of donated bikes when the initial supply was gone.
"We only pay for the first shipment. But it's just beautiful to get the call where they are saying, 'Mr. Keith, we have the money,'" he said. "I'll ask, how much do you have? And they say $15,000. It hasn't happened just once, it has happened seven times now. They have become ferocious entrepreneurs."
To date, A&K's programs have collected and shipped 5,206 bikes, all but 672 of which have gone to Africa The rest were recently sent to Jordan in a partnership with Wheels of Change and the Jordan-based sustainable tourism and cultural heritage protection enterprise Baraka and with additional funding from World Nomads / Footprint Network and Tourism Cares.
In Jordan, Sproule said, the program emphasis is slightly different, with a focus not specifically on helping women entrepreneurs and with a stronger bent on developing bicycle tourism businesses over sales because of the country doesn't really have a biking culture.
"We are still dealing with bike riding in general," Sproule said. "You have to be respectful. You can push the edges of change, but you can't go too much."