For girls in rural Zambia, getting to school often involves walking at least an hour each way. Community health workers in Kenya must walk 40 to 60 minutes just to reach their health facilities, and even longer to visit clients in their homes. In Zimbabwe, employees of one company face an average 3.5-hour walk to work.

In these and other rural regions across the world, access to education, health care, and economic opportunity is severely constrained by a lack of reliable, efficient transportation. More than 600 million people walk as their primary mode of transportation in sub-Saharan Africa alone.

Since 2005, World Bicycle Relief (WBR) has shown that the humble bicycle can be an accessible, affordable tool for tackling the barriers of distance and supporting sustainable development.

A vision of bicycles as a tool to improve people’s lives spurred F.K. Day and Leah Missbach Day to found World Bicycle Relief after witnessing the devastation of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. With support from SRAM Corporation, the bicycle component manufacturer that Day co-founded, and from the broader bicycle industry, they distributed more than 24,000 bikes in Sri Lanka. As the country worked to rebuild, the bicycles helped people reconnect to schools, clinics, and the marketplace.

Seeing the difference bicycles made in Sri Lanka, the Days were compelled to explore whether they could have a similar impact in parts of Africa and other developing nations. Since then, WBR has partnered with NGOs, development agencies, governments, and private industry to provide nearly 400,000 bicycles in 19 countries across Africa, South East Asia, and South America.

Read more on how World Bicycle Relief supports sustainable development by Allegra Abramo at Global Washington.