Along with being an environmentally friendly alternative for transport, bikes have been proven to better enable community workers to make a bigger difference. In some areas, bikes allow caregivers to travel three times as far as if they were walking - seeing four times as many patients. Additionally, a bike can empower community workers to carry five times as much weight as they could walking, enabling more supplies, products and people to be transported. Multiply this by just a few bikes and transformation of a wider community can happen.
Recognising this power that bikes hold, as well as celebrating the fact that Cape Town is one of the world's most cycle-friendly cities, the Beyond Sport Cape Town Bike Award will look to support local programmes through providing bikes that can be utilised by the participants and the organisers alike in order to better achieve their mission to address social issues within their communities.
The award is open for entry to any organisation, project, or grassroot initiative that strives to address a social issue through sport within Cape Town or surrounding area, and can increase their impact through the utilisation of bikes. The shortlist will receive a minimum of two bikes each, while the winner will receive a minimum of 15, depending on the need and use of the bikes outlined by each entered project.
Each year, Beyond Sport strives to deliver tangible benefits in the city where the summit is held through holding an annual award in order to celebrate, support and provide resources for the local programmes aiming to create social change through sport in their communities. This year's local award encapsulates some of the key themes Beyond Sport strives to promote - maximising in-kind support and creating tangible change through shared-value partnerships.
Globalbike, which partners with other organisations in order to maximise the transformative power of bikes to create positive social change in the developing world, has proven that bikes can provide critical support and efficiencies for those individuals and programmes that use them. In Cape Town, Globalbike aims to bring this same tool to organisations whose positive impacts can grow exponentially when combined with the power of two wheels.
