Is the provision of inexpensive, sturdy bicycles part of the solution to poverty in sub-Saharan Africa? I have no idea. But I can certainly see bicycles as a potential social good for a host of reasons, poverty alleviation being only one.
In my research on my current book project on bus boycotts in the United States and South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s I have consistently run across ads for bicycles in South African newspapers that quite clearly seem aimed at township dwellers and particularly at participants in boycotts in Alexandra. It seems that South Africans were for many years quite reluctant to sign on to bicycles as a viable form of transportation, though that, like so many other things in the country, seems to be changing.
