We often get emails from people in the early phases of planning a bicycle distribution project in a developing country. If you're one of them you've probably chosen or are finalizing your choice of a project location. Whether or not you are planning to use Worldbike technologies in your project, you need to know how to craft your project in way that's consistent with the conditions in the location where you will be working.

The list below shows the top four location-specific factors you must understand when considering a project location.

1. Level of economic activity. How busy is the place? How many people are buying and selling? This factor is distinct from, but related to the second factor, access to capital. Some locations are relatively wealthy, but have little activity. Other places are poor, but the streets are bustling with activity. There are many economic transactions taking place. This factor encompasses rural/urban considerations -- cities generally have more economic activity than rural locations. It will therefore be harder to successfully market and sell a utility bicycle in a rural location. This factor gets to the issue of whether people will be able to make a predictable income by using your bicycles (or Worldbike bicycles) to deliver people and things.
2. Customer access to capital. This factor cuts to the chase of whether your market can afford your product offering. To what degree will you and your project funders be required to subsidize the bicycles before people can own them? As bicycle designers and social entrepreneurs, we all hope that the bicycles we design and sell will be so compellingly useful that people will simply 'find a way' to purchase them. And in some cases, they will. However, the access to capital in your project location will certainly affect this process, and you have to know this information ahead of time in order to set reasonable expectations of what you can achieve in your project.
3. Perception of non-motorized transportation. Like it or not, we live in an increasingly connected world, saturated with images and media. Automobiles and trucks are often seen as desirable status symbols, while bicycles are seen as lower-class. One middle-class Kenyan woman described her social embarassment at having her father pick her up from her boarding school on a bicycle. As bicycle designers and advocates, we may not agree with these prejudices about the bike, and we all want to help spread and preserve bike culture around the world. But this factor can't be ignored, and it will make your project work an uphill battle.
4. Transport needs fit a bike scale. When you look at the economic activity in the location you are considering for your project, what are the distances like? What are the hills like? How is the climate? How predictable are the rains? Sometimes this question can be deceiving. You may be considering a particular location that seems ideal in all other respects, only to realize it is fairly hilly. But even hilly locations can make good project locations. Bicycle-based economies tend to be highly specialized. You may be able to identify particular one-way routes that are profitable for bike transport. For example, the road from Nairobi to Kisumu passes through Kenya's Rift Valley. You climb perhaps 1000-2000 vertical feet out of Nairobi to a ridge before descending to this spectacular volcanic valley. And heading up this hill in an Easy Coach bus, you will see bicyclists descending, loaded down with agricultural goods, bound for Nairobi's markets. Looking back to your side of the road, you'll pass cyclists pushing their bikes back up hill, or, comically, hanging on the back of a truck.

Consider the table below:

The paths represent existing market conditions with Path 1 being the least favorable set of conditions and Path 3 the most favorable conditions. It is not expected that a potential market will represent the attributes of a single path. Rather, it is anticipated that markets will have attributes from at least two, if not all three, paths. The purpose of this matrix is to enable WorldBike to develop implementation plans that are customized for each potential market, based on an analysis of the market characteristics as they relate to these four most important environmental factors and corresponding path attributes for each factor.

For example, a potential market could have characteristics that are represented as follows:

Above table: Potential Market Example

In this situation, WorldBike would design a plan that would forecast quantities based on a moderate level of economic activity with many opportunities for establishing the usefulness of a WorldBike bicycle for commercial transport. Given the limited access to capital, this would be a good opportunity to leverage partnerships such as a development organization or microfinance institution. There will need to be a number of demonstrations to engage the entrepreneurial community with the concept.

Acknowledgements: Thanks to our Presidio MBA team (Max Bakker, Kenton Harmer, Erik Froyd, Justin Sternberg) for their hard work preparing the analysis used for this Worldbike How-To.