Every year, about 180 learners and community workers are the happy recipients of ‘recycled’ bicycles, thanks to a partnership between the City of Cape Town and the City of Aachen (Germany).

In what is known as the Bicycle Recycle Project, used bicycles are collected from Aachen residents one Saturday every year, prepared by a group of volunteers, and shipped by container to Cape Town within a few days. The donors are usually bicycle commuters who have owned their bikes for 20 years or so, and cannot cycle any more due to old age or ill health; or they’ve recently purchased new bikes and would rather donate than sell their former bikes. ‘Bike donation’ day is announced in the press and on radio, and people from all over the area deliver their bikes for donation.

Once the bicycles get to Cape Town – each container can ship 180 ‘vehicles’ - the bicycles are then repaired and refurbished by local bicycle NGOs as part of a skills-training project, and distributed among partner organisations in the Aachen – Cape Town Partnership for Sustainable Livelihoods. The bicycles are used by local community based organisations for the promotion of social and environmental projects.

Recent recipients include Self Help Manenberg’s Youth Forum (which educates learners about environmental health and career planning, and runs support groups for out-of-school youths-at-risk and young offenders); and Schools Environmental Education and Development (SEED), a Cape Flats based project that works at transforming learning environments through Permaculture.

The Aachen-Cape Town Partnership is not about wealthy people from the north giving to the poor from the south, but about mutual learning and growth, and increased understanding for the issues all people have to grapple with, say the Aachen participants.

Other key priority areas of the partnership include urban farming and greening, energy, waste management, transport, health, urban design and musical education.

The partnership between Aachen and Cape Town, which includes civil society, cultural, business and educational institutions from both cities, is known as the Aachen–Cape Town Partnership for Sustainable Livelihoods and is based on the principles of Agenda 21. Partners commit to implement the principles and practice of global sustainability and partnerships at a local level, as outlined in Agenda 21 at the United National Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and endorsed at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg.

For more information visit www.aachen-kapstadt.de or
www.sage-net.org.