Build A Bike

Over 100 employees of a Canadian company in the house maintenance business and their spouses/guests came to El Triunfo, Guanacaste, Costa Rica to contribute time and resources to the Build A Bike programme. The programme was based around  a donation of 40 bikes for children from a local primary school in the Northwest region of Costa Rica: a rural low-income community, where children travel long distances to get to their school, due to reduced, or sometimes no service of public transportation.

The province of Guanacaste, where the program took place, is very extensive and many small communities are apart from everything, surrounded only by large farms or haciendas. Children in these villages walk from 10 minutes to 2 hours to get to school, as most of their families don’t own a vehicle or a bike, or don´t even have enough money to use public transportation on a daily basis, when available. The bikes donated changed the access and time taken to get to school for all the children who received one through the programme.

Besides, it also turned out to be a great opportunity to teach them sustainable practices, with the children also receiving a reusable water bottle to promote waste reduction and recycling.