If any of you remember clearly, one of our very first assignments in this class was to read Bill Strickland’s essay, “What Every Kid Wants”. In his essay he recounts on cherished childhood memories and discusses some imperative points about the freedom and joy you feel when riding a bike.

One of my favorite lines while reading his essay was, “There is no more useful toy than a bicycle; no vehicle more playful, no piece of exercise equipment so liberating, and no symbol of childhood that so powerfully and paradoxically signals the coming of childhood” (22).

This statement of how bicycles are a significant piece of our lives that mark the transition between childhood to adulthood struck a few interesting questions that I wanted to investigate: How does having a bicycle affect a child in developing countries? What makes it different from how we grew up as American children?

While spending time researching a couple of organizations that helped provide bicycles for children in developing countries, I came across a campaign called “Girl Rising”. If we recount Tseng and Fogg’s short article, they briefly discuss how with the technology we have today, information can be accessed online, and they appear are more credible and reliable sources than actual humans. All of Girl Rising’s information can be accessed online through their main website girlrising.com. Their website is extremely transparent and is easily accessible for your curiosity. Referring to Horner’s, “Establishing Credibility and Appealing to Your Audience”, Girl Rising truly shows the virtue of goodwill through many of their selfless works shown on their site; countlessly reiterating their common interests and concerns. Their site includes what their campaign is about and why they specifically chose to empower young girls, who they’re partners with, members of their team with hyperlinks that send you to an “about me” page, a press page with FAQs and images, and even short films that follow the lives of the young girls they’ve been inspiring and changing for the better.  

In the end, I learned as a researcher that Girl Rising is a global campaign that focuses on empowering and educating young girls in developing countries such as India, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nigeria. Their mission is to change societies and the way the world views young girls and women. One of the many ways this campaign assists these young girls is by partnering with organizations such as “World Vision’s 10×10” to provide bicycles. In the conditions in which each of these girls live, the bicycles provide a safer,faster journey as an alternative to walking through extremely dangerous areas that would thwart the possibility of an education. And based off of evidence given from the Girl Rising website, the attendance and student success rate in has gone up 35-36.7% for girls and boys, showing that having the access to a bike greatly benefits a child living in poverty. 

Now what’s the difference between the children of America and children in other countries? Well in America we perceive the idea of a bicycle as an easily accessible toy of leisure; it’s the mark between childhood to adulthood whereas in other developing countries a bicycle is a costly investment and could mean the difference between receiving an education or not.