Pikilily/MJ Piki Report July 2020
Introduction for the benefit of new Presidents
Pikilily is the WIMA International supported organisation which was set up in 2016 by GB member Claire Elsdon after her solo ride from London to Cape Town. Its purpose is to empower Tanzanian women, teaching them to ride and maintain motorcycles, to earn a living through the use of motorcycles, and to contribute their knowledge and time to their community. WIMA, Motorcycle Outreach and others funded a workshop, some motorcycles, and the training of several women. In late 2018, Pikilily was officially registered in Tanzania as MJ Piki, short for “Mwanamke Jasiri ya PikiPiki” which is Swahili for Brave Women on Motorcycles. See www.pikilily.com.
The Report
It has been another busy and productive year of growth and community development at MJ Piki, the Tanzanian non-profit Community Based Organisation wholly supported by Pikilily, which many of you will have been familiar with since 2016. In the past year, the project has taken on some exciting new initiatives. One of these has been to train 1,000 local school children in Mwanza in essential motorcycle safety. Though this might seem a surprising demographic to target for this kind of training, school children are often disproportionately affected by the high crash rates among Tanzanian motorcycle-taxi users, since they often ride both to and from school on them as passengers – more often than not with two or more children behind the rider and rarely wearing helmets. As a result, MJ Piki successfully applied for some funding to teach these children the basics, such as how to spot a roadworthy motorcycle at a glance, how to spot a safe rider, how to speak up on the journey if the rider does something dangerous and how a helmet works and why it is so important to wear on every journey. These lessons have been enormously successful as not only have the children been extremely interested to learn these tips, but subsequently their teachers and even parents have applied to have access to this same training. This has come about as the children have shared their learnings at home and therefore amplified the impact of this work, which is exactly what we had hoped. Furthermore, the MJ Piki women have enjoyed being trained as trainers, developing a new skill-set and growing their community influence.
In addition, earlier in 2020, MJ Piki put to work some funding that they had received from UK comedian Ross Noble to build a dedicated motorcycle taxi rank/stand on the roadside. This verandah-like brick structure acts as both a shelter from the elements and a marketing/publicity piece to encourage passers-by to try their taxi service and so far, they have seen monthly takings grow substantially as word spreads of their excellent service and focus on safety. This is so important to enable the project to grow the women’s take-home pay and ensure the sustainability of the project.
COVID-19 has had an impact on MJ’s progress so sadly, when the Tanzanian government closed schools in mid-March, this community training was also suspended. Fortunately however, Tanzanian schools are set to open again in July and so this good work can resume. At the same time, the women will also commence their “patchwork” safety programme for motorcycle-taxi drivers, where a professional tailor accustomed to heavy-duty projects will take up residence in the MJ Piki workshop and stitch the donated body-armour onto motorcycle-taxi riders clothes while the MJ women share motorcycle and road safety advice as the riders wait. We are so, so grateful for all the armour that has been donated and, subject to funding, hope to make another call for donations of body-armour and gloves very shortly.
The other unexpected impact of COVID-19 is that usage of the women’s motorcycle taxi service has increased as more passengers want to migrate away from bus usage given for social distancing reasons. The women are equipped with face masks and hand-sanitizer as well as a stand-pipe at their taxi rank, so are able to practise good hygiene and encourage passengers to do the same. Looking forward to the rest of this year and into next, there are a few interesting projects that we hope to gain approval from funding organisations to go ahead with and will announce in due course when we know more.
In the meantime, myself and all the women at MJ Piki would like to extend huge thanks to all WIMA members who have donated body-armour, funding and encouragement to MJ Piki over the last 12 months. The project is hugely boosted by your support and the women in particular really get a buzz from knowing that female riders like them from all over the world are cheering them on and supporting them so that they succeed in safeguarding motorcycle-taxi users in Tanzania.
HOW YOU CAN HELP!
Our women are very proud of their association with WIMA and would love to wear WIMA teeshirts, so if you can spare any with the WIMA logo on, please contact me via Messenger on Facebook or by email to .
We hope you all stay safe and well during this challenging time and wish you all the best for the rest of 2020.
Thanks and best wishes, Claire Elsdon, Founder.
