These are exciting times at P4P. There have been a lot of extremely positive developments since we wrote the last newsletter, concerning our past, our present, and our future.

Let’s first do the past. You know that we develop long-term partnerships with the organizations overseas that distribute our bicycles. Our oldest project — started in 1992 in Rivas, Nicaragua — created our model that we have duplicated around the world. It’s time to end the project!

We have shipped 25,569 bikes into Rivas and 42,879 to Nicaragua as a whole. It’s time to move on. The economy in Nicaragua is very bad right now but the people of Rivas have mobility; the town is saturated with bikes. Rivas has moved from a walking city to a mechanized city; our work there is done.

When we started in Rivas the average child completed four years of school. Today because they all have bicycles and can get to school do their studies and get home in time to do their chores, the average child completes high school. It was all done on bicycles donated by you.

There have been a couple of documentaries on the success of the city; the most notable is “The Bicycle City” by Greg Sucharew. (Click here for a one-minute trailer.)

While Rivas is a tremendous success I am sad because I have interacted with the people of this community for over 25 years and I will always consider Wilfredo Santana my brother. But ending the Rivas program will allow P4P to ship to other places currently in greater need.

Next we move on to the present. During the economic slowdown and for the first two years of our nation’s economic recovery, bicycle sales were down, which meant that many fewer people were buying new bikes and donating their old bikes to P4P. Our production fell to a low in 2016 that it not been seen since the very first days of the organization in the early 1990s. This has changed!

National bicycle sales are improving, which means we are getting more bikes per collection and there are more groups wanting to run collections. We are still looking for collections in new communities, but production is up.

This increased production, along with the bikes we will no longer ship to Rivas, adds up to a lot of containers needing a destination.

And this brings us to the future. We have not added a new bicycle program since 2011. Our active partners have gobbled up all of the containers we had to ship in the slow years, and our first goal is to resupply existing partners. But now we have enough bikes to add multiple new bicycle programs. This is exciting work. It is also extremely labor-intensive and can be costly.

Any new venture requires investment. A new partner organization overseas needs to get together a warehouse, a storefront, some employees, etc. This is a large undertaking. The model we have used for years, the Wilfredo Santana revolving-fund Model from Rivas, is that we donate the shipping costs of the first container as well as the contents. This gives enough funding to the new partner to get their feet on the ground and be able to start assuming shipping costs with the second container. We always donate the contents of a container, thanks to the generosity of our U.S. donors, large and small. Traditionally the contents of a container are worth three times the cost of shipping. That’s how we’ve been able to make almost 400 shipments overseas by leveraging the value of the bikes to pay the shipping.

New sewing machine projects are not that hard to fund because we’re just talking about a few hundred dollars. But shipping a container of bicycles costs many thousands of dollars. Potential new partners need to be screened really well before we can make such an investment. Paying the shipping costs to ship one of our containers overseas is an investment in that we expect these groups to become regular customers because they will be so happy with the bicycles they receive.

Many groups solicit containers of bicycles, some in countries with prohibitive transportation costs (inland Africa), some in countries that do not allow importation of used goods (most of South America). In other countries the governments are so corrupt that you can’t get through the door.

Last fall I made a sewing machine shipment to United Action for Children in Cameroon. I was extremely impressed by the UAC president, Orock Eyong — so impressed that in March 2018 P4P gifted a container of 462 bikes and 28 sewing machines to United Action for Children. It is due to arrive in Cameroon near the end of May. I am confident that UAC will become another of our long-term partnerships and that this is just the first of many containers we will be shipping to Cameroon.

On 21 April 2018, with the support of the Dariu Foundation of Switzerland, we shipped our first container to Can Tho Union City of Friendship Organization outside of Da Nang, Vietnam. In 2011 and 2012, with the help of the Dariu Foundation, we shipped 2 containers of bicycles to the upper Mekong Delta of Vietnam. In the intervening years, despite our best efforts, we just could not get the import permits. But we just received import permits to ship two containers of bicycles and up to 100 sewing machines. In the previous shipments we were not allowed to ship sewing machines so we hope we are in a new era of import policy in Vietnam.

We are always looking for interesting opportunities. On 19 May 2018 we shipped 450 bicycles and 50 sewing machines to our new partner GoBike in Kosovo! There are many areas in Eastern Europe which have never seen great investment or development, and are as poor as many African communities. With the assistance of a Clif Bar Family Foundation grant we were able to fund the shipment to Kosovo as well as a substantial part of the shipping costs to Cameroon. Thank you, Clif Bar.

David Schweidenback