Award Winning Social Enterprise Uses Bikes to Power Utilities

Every year, Echoing Green selects a handful of social entrepreneurs to participate in a two-year fellowship. Echoing Green fellows receive start-up capital and technical assistance to build their fledgling social enterprises. Perhaps the most interesting Echoing Green fellow this year is 23-year-old Jodie Wu, founder of Global Cycle Solutions.

Based in Arusha, Tanzania, Global Cycle Solutions is innovative from both an engineering and entrepreneurial perspective. The company creates devices that are powered by pedaling bicycles. Attach one of Global Cycle Solution's products to a bike, and it will transform into a corn sheller or a cell phone charger, to name just two examples.

Only 10 percent of Tanzania's 40 million people have access to electricity. In rural areas, that figure drops to one percent, a staggeringly low number considering that about four out of every five Tanzanians are farmers. Bicycles, on the other hand, are in high supply. "Hundreds of thousands of Tanzanians have bicycles," observed Wu in a recent interview. "The reason for doing technology on the bicycle rather than other things," she continued, "it's the idea that anywhere around the world you can run these technologies off a bicycle."

For a country with plenty of farmers but a scarcity of electricity, bicycle-powered agricultural utilities would seem a perfect fit. So Wu, a mechanical engineering graduate of MIT, invented a maize sheller that affixes to a bike through a special interface. The machine shells maize 40 times faster than by hand. Instead of having to repeatedly wallop a corn-filled bag with a stick, all you've got to do is pedal.

[Watch the maize sheller at work.]

The maize sheller kit costs $60, a sum which Wu admits is prohibitively costly in a country where 96.6 percent of the population lives on less than two dollars a day. "Our goal is to bring [the sheller] to the people through entrepreneurs who can then empower a village so the machine can then be shared by the village." Wu has also partnered with microfinance firms so that her products can be purchased on credit. Because the machine promises to improve productivity so drastically, the risk of default on microloans should be relatively low.

Global Cycle Solutions also offers a $10 cell phone charger, which is powered by, you guessed it, a bicycle. "You can be riding around, and it charges as you go," explained Wu. "My phone can charge in under an hour - and that's from zero to full charge. So if you ride at least six kilometers a day you pretty much never have to worry about charging your phone."

According to an MIT study, Africa is currently the fastest growing mobile phone market on the planet. Between 2005 and 2009, cell phone use on the continent increased by 65 percent annually. With low rates of electricity access and increasing rates of cell phone usage, bike-powered cell phone chargers ought to be in high demand.

The next step, says Wu, is to make Global Cycle Solutions in Tanzania a self-sustaining business, and then take it global. With a global market of around a billion bicycles, this young entrepreneur's products should have no trouble catching on worldwide.

Photo credit: Muhammad Mahdi Karim