A Tune-Up for African Health

Photograph courtesy of Riders for Health

Andrea and Barry Coleman believe they can achieve more than just Zen through the art of motorcycle maintenance.

After Mr. Coleman, a journalist who covers racing events, visited Somalia in 1989 and saw children who were dying because medical supplies couldn’t reach them, he and his wife, a third-generation motorcycle racer, decided to start Riders for Health, a charity that hopes to transform the state of transportation in Africa.

The Colemans’ charity, whose headquarters is in Northamptonshire, England, provides mechanic services and training for government and nonprofit health workers who rely on motorbikes to deliver care and medicine to people in remote areas of Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and the Gambia.

The charity employs 230 technicians and managers in Africa. It seeks to hire people who are residents of the countries where they work, with the hope they will stay on the job for a long time and can train other people to replace them.

For inspiration, the Colemans look to people like the woman they knew as “Mrs. Chino,” a Zimbabwean government health worker they met after her motorbike broke down. With no transportation, she was cut off from the rural villages she served. The bike had been taken to the nearest dealership — 300 miles away — but Mrs. Chino didn’t have the money to get it back. Still hoping to make her rounds, she waited for three days at a bus stop for a bus that never came.

When mechanics at Riders for Health contacted the dealership to find out what was wrong with Mrs. Chino’s vehicle, “they said there was some dirt in the carburetor,” Ms. Coleman says. “The problem was so simple, so idiotic for all the distress it caused.”

The organization retrieved the bike, taught Mrs. Chino the basic maintenance care, and later sent out a technician for monthly tune-ups.

Ms. Coleman believes that a small amount of mechanical training will make a big difference. “You can have four health workers going in four different directions, which saves time” — and, as a result, lives.

Here, a Riders for Health technician meets two public-health workers in the Nyanga district of Zimbabwe, to carry out the monthly service on their motorcycles.