Riders for Health have worked for 15 years on the problem of delivery systems for health care in Africa. Our work ensures that appropriate transport is used for health delivery and we provide a managed vehicle system to ensure that the vehicles never break down.

We work with ministries of health, UN agencies and other NGOs. Our main resource centre is in the UK while our programme staff are all nationals of the countries in which we work.

We are self-funded with no government support. Our origins are in the sport of motorcycle racing and successful fundraising at motorcycling events and races enables us to support our pioneering field initiatives, ensuring that motorcycles continue to save lives in Africa.

Our Vision-

Riders for Health is an humanitarian organisation. For us, this means working towards a world in which no-one is subject to the miseries of poverty and avoidable ill-health.

Mission

Riders ensures vehicles used for the delivery of health care and associated development in Africa are available for the maximum time at the minimum cost.

Across Africa Riders is steadily solving the problem described by our Patron, HRH The Princess Royal, as 'the tyranny of distance'.

Working with our partners we aim to ensure that completely reliable transport is available for the complete delivery of health services throughout Africa by 2015.

Transport management is not a headline-making or an eye-catching initiative, but it is the long-term, essential answer to Africa's problems. Africa's people can be free of the oppression of disease; Africa can have a chance to move forward.

Programmes and Activities-

Using vehicles for health service delivery costs money. But since the use of vehicles is fundamental to the delivery process Riders' primary focus has always been to manage this cost effectively and, in so doing, safeguard the benefit to the people reached with health care.

It was clear from day one that this is only possible if health delivery vehicles are serviced to a level where they do not break down. If vehicles are allowed to deteriorate below this level, a substantial cost for repair has to be met without warning. Humanitarian fleets often collapse years before their potential life-span, because repairs prove to be unpredictable and un-affordable. An entire fleet will quickly fail once its vehicles start to need repairs.

To combat this problem Riders developed Transport Resource Management (TRM): a system managing the vehicles, people and money involved in the health service delivery operation.

Riders now operates TRM on a national scale in Nigeria, the Gambia and Zimbabwe, running nearly 800 vehicles in total. Riders' experience in these countries has shown that motorcycles are an invaluable resource in isolated rural populations. Not only are motorcycles more straight-forward to maintain than four-wheeled vehicles, they are also cheaper to run, making it an affordable reality to include enough vehicles within the TRM system to mobilise an African nation's entire staff of public health workers.

External funding may be required to install the appropriate infrastructure from which to manage health service vehicles, but once it is in place, a country's health service is mobilised suprisingly rapidly and cheaply. In fact, it costs just ten pence per mile for a single public health worker to reach 20,000 people regularly on his self-maintained, Riders-managed motorcycle. That works out at just £1,200 gbp a year.