(20 Jun 2025)
RESTRICTION SUMMARY:
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Lira, Uganda – 19 May 2025
1. Wide of Lucy Abalo, a Community Health Extension Worker, riding her bicycle
2. SOUNDBITE (English) Lucy Abalo, Community Health Extension worker (CHEW):
++PARTLY OVERLAID WITH SHOT 3, 4 AND 5++
"This bike is ever out here since this is the only bike that whenever anybody who wants it and they know it. The community knows that if you want a bike, don’t bother. Just go to Lucy she will give you the bike, you use it. I have some clients here who go and pick the drugs and that is the most important thing that this bike is doing here in this community."
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Lira, Uganda – 18 May 2025
3. Various of Buffalo bike outside Abalo's house
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Lira, Uganda – 19 May 2025
4. Various of Abalo riding a bike to visit health clients
5. Various of Abalo interacting with clients
6. SOUNDBITE (English) Susan Apio, Community Health Extension worker (CHEW):
++PARTLY OVERLAID WITH SHOT 7 AND 8++
"At first when we were walking it was very hard sometime even you can be caught by the rain because you would be walking. But when they gave us the bicycle, this thing really helped us more especially I am talking because of me. It has helped me because when I am moving within the community, I don’t take long. Even I don’t take time. It also helps me to cover a number of households within the community."
7. Various of Susan Apio, a Community Health Extension Worker (CHEW) leaving her house
8. Apio riding her bicycle
STORYLINE:
The bicycle parked in Lucy Abalo’s compound doesn’t belong to her.
Anyone of the hundreds of people in her village can show up and ask to use it.
“The community knows that if you want a bike, don’t bother. Just go to Lucy she will give you the bike, you use it,” Abalo said.
She is one of dozens of “village doctors” in rural Uganda who recently were supplied with the ‘Buffalo Bicycle’, because its steel parts are reinforced to perform in areas with bad roads.
World Bicycle Relief, a Chicago-based nonprofit, promotes the Buffalo Bicycle in remote parts of Africa.
It collaborates with governments, non-governmental groups and others who use the bikes to improve access to health services.
In Uganda, an east African country of 45 million people, efforts to market the bicycle have focused on supporting health workers like Abalo, who visits people’s homes and reports any issues to authorities.
As a community health extension worker, or CHEW, she has gained the trust of villagers, who can knock on her door in emergency situations.
She said she helps to look after about 8,000 people in the area.
World Bicycle Relief, operating locally as Buffalo Bicycles Uganda, has collaborated with Ugandan health authorities since 2023 to equip 331 CHEWs in two of the country's 146 districts.
Bicycles have long been ubiquitous, and many families have one.
Cultural norms in northern Uganda don’t prohibit women from riding.
While the roads... [truncated]
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Video at Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNoPwi8PvKQ