WIMA suports Pikilily and MJ Piki
MJ PIKI
MJ Piki is the local Community Based Organisation in Mwanza, Tanzania that is supported by Pikilily and works exclusively with women to train them to ride and maintain motorcycles safely. Currently our women then go on to use motorcycles to generate an income for themselves e.g. by becoming a delivery rider or working as a motorcycle taxi driver.
These women are not only getting a rare opportunity to learn skills and earn much-needed money for themselves and their children, but are also gently challenging gender stereotypes by doing these jobs. Out of the circa 5000 motorcycle taxi drivers in Mwanza region, only our riders are women, so they really are brave pioneers and role-models. In fact, that’s what MJ Piki stands for: “Mwanamke Jasiri ya PikiPiki” in Swahili or “Brave women on motorcycles” in English, a name that the founding three women in this project came up with themselves. It is a name they live up to with pride.
MJ PIKI
Mj Piki (or Mama jasiri ya Piki in Swahili) is the new name for Pikilily – roughly translated this means “Brave women on motorcycles, or hero lady bikers.”
Christmas update from MJ Piki
So excited to share our good news with you all this Christmas, especially after the rollercoaster that this year has been! Next year is set to be a busy one!
Our grant is going to enable us to hire and train more women as well as share our road safety training with 300 motorcycle taxi drivers plus 200 school children in our community, which is brilliant and certainly life saving! We do, however, always have dull but ever so essential costs to cover such as rent, utilities, petrol, maintenance etc, so if you would be able to help us keep our doors open and grow our work, please either contact me for direct donation details or give to our crowdfunding campaign. Many thanks!
Claire Elsdon
Mj Piki Christmas message
If you want to donate to MJ Piki, you can do this via crowdfunding on Just Giving.
We want to say a special thank you to WIMA World for keeping the faith and voting to continue support for another year in our new venture.
Things have gone really well since we decided to restructure. We’ve now completed all the registration that is necessary in Mwanza, so this new structure is now set up which is great and we’re apJ$q%tVRoqQdwPRcJDlready seeing a lot of advantages to having restructured locally, for example a lot more support from community officials and a lot fewer bureaucratic issues. So that’s very positive.
Thanks to all the generous donors who re-pledged pretty much the same amount of money we were given for the moto-ambulance project, we’ve been able to buy four new Honda Ace 125cc motorcycles. The bikes have now arrived and the girls have had a chance to start riding around on them which is brilliant. They have also been learning English for the last two or three months which is really important in terms of the service they can give all customers, whether it’s locals or people who only speak English. So they can offer a really professional service.
Also positive even though we are not actually running the motorcycle ambulances, there’s been lots of interest from various groups in working with us – to provide riders and also training and consultancy services, so that other people can run those ambulances – but we would continue to renovate them and provide advice on running them. We would still have a positive impact on the lives of women and children in the local area, so we are very excited to update you with this development and we are very keen to see this aspect of our work grow.
Mj Piki Girls with new Hondas October 2018