World Bicycle Relief (WBR) mobilizes people through the “Power of Bicycles” and envisions a world where distance is no longer a barrier to independence and livelihoods. WBR designs, builds and distributes rugged bicycles to students, healthcare workers and entrepreneurs in rural regions of developing countries, to better connect them to livelihoods, education and healthcare. Their Buffalo Bicycles are simple, locally-assembled, durable bicycles specifically designed for rural terrain and able to carry up to 100kg on the rear carrier. To date, WBR has distributed nearly 500,000 bicycles across its global program locations and trained over 2,000 local bicycle mechanics.
The Start of Our Journey Together
As WBR’s program grew in scope and its monitoring and evaluation needs evolved, the organization identified three main issues that led it to look for a digital system. Bicycles are manufactured in Taiwan, shipped to countries of operation, assembled in central warehouses, and distributed to schools — but after leaving the warehouses, bicycles were difficult to track, manually allocated to students against a paper list, with limited visibility into maintenance levels. As WBR grew to work with 169 schools across four countries by 2018, paper-based monitoring made it increasingly difficult to track activities and receive data in a timely manner. WBR had already been using Salesforce to manage its fundraising and finances, but wanted to evolve its use of the database further by integrating monitoring and evaluation into the same system, leading WBR to seek help on Salesforce from Vera Solutions.
Barcode Scanners Help Break Down Barriers
Vera Solutions helped World Bicycle Relief set up its Salesforce instance in 2015 to start basic monitoring and evaluation of bicycle beneficiaries. However, WBR still relied on paper to get information from the field into the system. To remedy this, Vera Solutions built a custom page to upload data into the system, but this method proved increasingly time-consuming and challenging as WBR continued to scale. Taking into account WBR’s growth and increase in data needs, Vera Solutions evolved the bespoke M&E system into a robust unique identifier system for tracking individuals and bicycles, in addition to working offline using TaroWorks’ Mobile Field Services App.
World Bicycle Relief is now able to track multiple indicators with offline data, including bicycle allocations to students, bicycle usage, repairs and maintenance, Bicycle Supervisory Committee activities, education outcomes (performance and attendance), and annual school profile indicators. Data logged by the Bicycle Supervisory Committees is sent directly to WBR’s Salesforce system, where staff can monitor up-to-date records and reports. One critical TaroWorks functionality that WBR leverages is barcode scanning, used to assign bicycles to program participants during Bicycle Distribution Ceremonies and to track bicycle maintenance when service requests are made.