Project Rwanda Goes Ivy League

The cargo bike makes it to Cambridge

The Harvard Business School has selected Project Rwanda as one of its organizations in Rwanda for their MBA Immersion Experience Program (IXP.) A team of 36 students and 4 advisors will focus on three organizations in Rwanda. Project Rwanda will be collaborating with four MBA graduate school students who will travel to Rwanda and assist in the cargo bike distribution channel project from January 6-16th.

Jake Chaya, Project Development Advisor to Project Rwanda and Kim Coats, Rwanda National Bike Distribution Director will team up with Kurt Piemonte, Associate Director, Harvard Business School, Immersion Experience Program; Dana Pratt, MBA Career & Professional Development; Laura Moon, Director, Social Enterprise Initiative; Faculty Leader Louis Wells, Herbert F. Johnson Professor of International Management at the Harvard Business School and Ellen Seidensticker Advisor to the president at Oxfam America. Harvard Business School MBA candidates working with Project Rwanda are Asha Haji , Elizabeth Gilliam, SuiLin Yap and Rassul Zarinfar.

The team will be interviewing farmers, farmer families and cooperatives; gathering the data, analyzing it and providing their learning’s and recommendations of how the cargo bike has impacted the farmers financially. Project Rwanda and the Harvard Business School will prove and validate first-hand how bikes can double, triple and in some cases quadruple farmer income in one year. The project will have a huge impact getting government and institutional financial support to expand the program since farmer’s average income without a bike is approximately $300 annually.

The Project Rwanda mission is to transform lives using the bike as a tool. Project Rwanda has distributed approximately 2000 cargo bikes to farmers over the past two years. We began to do case studies by returning to farmers who had purchased a bike and gather information on the economic benefits the farmer, their family and their community or cooperative received from owning a bike. Our first five case studies (found in the Project Rwanda website) proved that farmer income rose 200% to 500% in one year.

Working with some of the best business minds at a world-class university coupled with some of the most passionate hearts for Rwanda with Project Rwanda, we believe we are taking a major step in our goal of giving people hope after generations of hopelessness.

Without having a large sample case and documented case histories, and Project Rwanda not having the resources or capacity to gather the data and validate their work or farmer’s successes, Harvard Business School found this a noble project. The HBS will provide Project Rwanda with a very hands-on, facts-based business case, which will improve grant and donor opportunities; and provide a valuable opportunity to MBA candidates to experience Rwanda first hand and apply their education by helping Project Rwanda transform lives. Most importantly, poor people in Rwanda will have spoken to the world that every cargo bike owned by a farmer is very important to their future, just as a automobile and truck are important to the western world’s future for transportation and shipping of goods.

The goal of this collaboration to bring greater credibility to the result-oriented philosophy that Project Rwanda is striving to achieve, so donors will support the people in Rwanda through Project Rwanda, and the Harvard Business School provides a great learning experience for these students as well as laying the ground work for addition partnerships in field studies and Internships and future IXP Program projects.

Project Rwanda aspires to raise $500,000 in 2010 to establish the bike distribution business so farmers and other small business owners can be more profitable and sustainable, thus their lives will be transformed. If we achieve our goal in 2010, our vision is to train and mentor Rwandans to take ownership of the bike distribution channel as a for-profit business in 2011. This will also help Rwanda create new jobs.

Our work with Harvard Business School will help us in this cause as we believe donating to the Project Rwanda effort will provide a greater return on investment; that farmers and their families will be a good initiative for you to donate to and our long-term vision will be directly accomplished by your giving efforts. Project Rwanda is a 501(c)3 tax exempt organization.

Watch for our progress in the Harvard IXP blog we will host on the Project Rwanda website.