Climate Concern
Riders for Health takes the issue of climate change very seriously. We understand that there will always be concerns about increasing carbon output when advocating the increased use of motorcycles and other vehicles powered by fossil fuels. However, Riders believes that the small impact of our vehicles on the environment is massively outweighed by the positive effect of our work on rural communities in Africa.
If Africa is to have a chance of moving forward, public health professionals must be able to reach rural communities with health care and other essential services. But each health worker typically has a caseload of around 20,000 people spread throughout several villages, which can be anything up to 20 miles apart. Very simply, no transport means no health care. Travelling 20 miles to visit your doctor’s surgery in an SUV produces 11kg of carbon. A health worker who travels 20 miles from her clinic to a rural village in Zimbabwe, on a Yamaha AG100, produces 0.2kg of carbon, but has provided health care to hundreds of people.
That is to say, one-hundredth of the carbon emitted by the SUV.
Riders takes great care to adjust and service carefully the fuel intake and exhaust systems for all the vehicles in its care. This adjustment alone saves an immense amount of carbon outpout. Also, Riders takes meticulous care to train riders and drivers to use their vehicles carefully and economically, thus minimising carbon output.
To provide health workers with an appropriate means of getting around their local area, Riders uses low-tech motorcycles with small engine sizes, so their fuel usage is low. And by making sure that the bikes are well-maintained, and the health workers ride them responsibly, Riders ensures that harmful emissions are kept to a minimum.
The carbon output per capita in the countries where Riders works is still amongst the lowest in the world. The combined per capita carbon output of Zimbabwe, Nigeria and the Gambia is 6 times lower than that of the UK, and 13 times lower than the per capita output of the USA. Riders estimates that an average health worker covers around 12,000 kilometres on their motorcycle each year, emitting just one tonne of carbon. This is 30 times less than the output of a typical 1.8L family car travelling the same distance, and almost 40 times less than a single person’s carbon footprint for a flight from London to Sydney. Amazingly, it is 72 times less than the annual output of one person in the UK.
Reliable mobility for health workers enables the available resources to reach the people who so desperately need them, transforming the lives of thousands of people. 21st century technology is the key to improving the future for Africa, but Riders’ systems ensure that this technology can be properly managed – providing the maximum benefit for people’s lives with the minimum impact on the environment.