Who we work With
Riders is working with organisations across Africa to make sure everyone has access to regular health care, no matter how isolated they are.
Partnerships and collaboration with people working at community level are integral to Riders’ approach. Our work underpins the work of any health-related organisation that serves rural communities, giving them predictable and reliable access to the poorest and most vulnerable.
‘Most of these disadvantaged children live off unbelievably bad roads. Riders enables us to get to these communities’. Director, Farm Orphan Support Trust, Zimbabwe.
Riders works together with its partners to embed the culture of vehicle maintenance in Africa, and to build the local capacity needed to put into practice the Riders’ system. This means that the responsibility and benefits of uplifting health in rural communities are shared equally by Riders, the agencies we mobilise and the people living in those communities.
Working with government
Reaching an entire nation of people on a regular basis requires a huge number of vehicles – from 100cc motorcycles to trucks and ambulances – all of which need to function reliably in areas where even the best roads may be no more than a dirt track. For Africa to have even a chance of effective and sustainable development, its governments must have the support they need to create effective transportation systems. For over 17 years, Riders for Health has therefore been working with African governments to manage their vehicle fleets effectively, enabling them to reach even the most isolated rural communities.
Riders began working with the Lesotho Ministry of Health in 1991. From there we extended our work to the Zimbabwean Ministry of Health in 1996 and now operates a nationwide programme for them, with a particular focus on managing the motorcycles used by local public health workers for outreach health care delivery. And in 2002, Riders and the government of the Gambia signed a historic agreement that the government would outsource all its vehicle management (starting with the Department of State for Health) to Riders.
For African governments, predictable transportation brings with it the ability to plan their work effectively, to manage finances and budgets, and to set and achieve targets. When health workers are mobilised, and no longer have to walk huge distances to reach villages, they are able to spend longer with patients, visit them more regularly and build the trust and relationships needed to tackle sensitive issues like HIV/AIDS. In short, they can do the job they were trained to do. And without the huge exertion of walking for miles each day, they themselves become healthier too.
Local partnerships
While working with governments is critical to building a sustainable solution to the issues of transport for development, governments are not the only stakeholders in delivering services in the developing world. Local community-based groups also have a key role to play in reaching people at a rural level, and are as much in need of vehicles as a government ministry, even if the scale is much smaller.
Organisations working at this grassroots 
level are desperate for access to reliable transport. They know what they could achieve with even a small fleet of vehicles. Yet very rarely do these groups have access to a system that would allow them to budget or plan for the management and servicing of outreach vehicles.
Riders’ fleet management system was designed to provide the flexibility needed by these local programmes. It can work just as well for just one motorcycle for a remote mission hospital as for a UN agency operating 1000 vehicles across an entire country.
In Kenya, for instance, Riders works with the US-based organisation, Africa Infectious Diseases Village Clinics, which provides basic health care, prevention, diagnosis and treatment to around 90,000 people. Riders has enabled AVC to broaden its outreach ability by advising on the purchase of appropriate motorcycles, and providing training in riding and maintenance. A similar partnership has also recently begun with Vumilia, a local community-based organisation focussing on the problem of HIV/AIDS in the Kabras community of Kakamega District.
Training
It is only by ensuring that a maintenance culture is embedded down to community level that developing countries can hope to build the capacity needed to meet their development goals – no system in Africa can be sustainable in the long term unless it is run and managed by the people of the country in which it operates. 
In order to help build this maintenance culture across Africa, and beyond, Riders established the International Academy of Vehicle Management (IAVM) in Harare, Zimbabwe, in 2002. At the IAVM, Riders trains health workers and outreach staff from local and international NGOs how to maintain two- and four-wheeled vehicles, and how to ride and drive them safely. You can find out more about the IAVM here.