WIMA suports Pikilily
Pikilily Annual Report 2019
Since last year’s AGM, Pikilily has been officially registered in Tanzania as a non-profit CBO – Community Based Organisation. Its local name is MJ Piki which means “brave women on motorcycles”. Its objectives are to empower women, through motorcycling, which will benefit their families and the wider community.
Six women have been trained and licensed to safely ride and maintain motorcycles. They have also had English-language and self-defence training. They are the first 6 women out of about 500 bodabodas (taxi riders) in Mwanza, so they are pioneers in a traditionally male occupation. They are providing a safe taxi service, especially to vulnerable women and children. In addition, they are setting a good example to the male bodaboda community by dressing correctly and riding safely, as well as encouraging other local women to dare to dream they could join them or achieve their own goals in life. Alongside the taxi service, they are also running a home delivery service of fruit and vegetables. The income they are earning is beginning to give them independence from unskilled jobs, and unemployment.
Equally important is the objective to reduce deaths and injuries from motorcycle accidents. Medium term plans are for our women to take their knowledge and experience into schools to conduct road safety training. For the moment it is not possible for bureaucratic reasons to run the motorcycle ambulance service, but this remains a long term objective.
Pikilily is grateful to WIMA for its continued support, especially to WIMA France who, in addition to their generous donation of 1500 euros last year, have this year, promoted Pikilily/MJ Piki at their Orange meeting, collected boxes of armour and raised money for the shipping. Asa made a presentation at Horizons Unlimited in Sweden and initiated a WRWR Ripple Relay in collaboration with WIMA Sweden, which is currently raising money. Pikilily/MJ Piki has also been promoted on WIMA’s social media pages.
We have more women waiting to join our pioneers. It costs €330 per woman for riding and maintenance training, licences, plus helmets and protective uniforms. We would be most grateful if WIMA can help us train one more woman over the coming months. If this fundraising target should be exceeded, we would love to put the extra funds towards buying a motorcycle for this newly-trained woman to use. The current price of a new 125cc Honda or Yamaha equivalent is around €1100 delivered to our workshop.
Thank you.
Claire Elsdon, WIMA GB member
MJ Piki Joseph Lewiston July 2019
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