My PhD fieldwork in Sierra Leone looks at how bicycles feature in African girls’ access to education. Although there is a paucity of empirical research in this area, there are still projects working in this area. One research project that has been an invaluable resource for me, is Laurens Hof’s Master thesis entitled: Teaching girls how to ride a bicycle: gender and cycling in Lunsar, Sierra Leone.
Laurens Hof is a Dutch student at Utrecht University. She undertook her 7-month research with the same organisation I will be working with later this month (Jan 2020). So the case study and background Lauren’ wrote up is a gold mine for me.
It was also useful because it provides important nuanced sociological insights about the local context and gender norms that relate to mobility in Lunsar.
Lauren’s research centres on one of three Village Bicycle Project programs – the girls Learn how to ride program.
Her final paper is a very interesting read and she has crammed it full of compelling (and for my project useful) local perspicacity.
Laurens uses Social Constructions as her theoretical frame to explore critical areas of gender, mobility, gender norms for children, knowledge transfer and community perception.
Here overarching research objective was: to create a thick description of how people in and around Lunsar use bicycles and which meaning they attach to them, informed by both the accessibility of bikes to women and girls and the effect of programs that teach girls how to ride a bicycle.
Below are the research questions that guided Laurens’ work and her final abstract.
Research questions
Her three research questions were:
Question One: What are gender norms and expectations and social stigmas for boys’ and girls’ behavior in Lunsar, and what do these gendered norms convey about the mobility of boys and girls?
Question Two: Who uses bicycles, how bicycles are being used, what are the social requirements for bike usage, and how is the technology perceived by both users and nonusers?
Question Three: How does the VBP use the ‘Learn to Ride’ program to promote cycling for girls, what is the theoretic foundation of this project, what is the effect of the program on the social stigmas that girls experience and how is the outcome perceived in the Lunsar area?
Lauren’s Abstract
Women and girls in sub Saharan African countries often face constraints and limitations on their mobility. Social stigmas and a lack of access to means of transport constrain their mobility.
In this research, headway is made into understanding the mobility of girls and women in Lunsar, as little is known about how in this region gender is perceived, as well as how those understandings of gender relate to the mobility of women. An overview is given of gender in the Lunsar society, and what the societal norms are for boys and girls. Specific attention is paid to the gender norms that relate to mobility.
One of the main findings is that girls’ mobility is constrained with a social stigma that girls who ride a bicycle will lose their virginity. The mobility of adult women is also constrained, a woman who rides a bicycle is deemed to be a prostitute.
These constraints that women and girls experience are not a uniform part of society, they are most regularly encountered in the neighboring villages, but not everyone holds to these beliefs.
In the second part of this research an analysis is made of how different groups within the Lunsar society understand and view bicycles. It shows that there are multiple interpretations possible, who are sometimes with each other in conflict. Bicycles are mainly seen as a tool for children to go to school, as well as a device to race and sport.
These dominating views drown out other potential views, such as the idea that a bicycle can be used for the transportation of goods.
Finally, the programs of the NGO Village Bicycle Project are reviewed and show the effect that teaching girls how to ride a bicycle has an effect on the exclusion of girls riding a bicycle.
It shows that teaching girls how to ride a bike increases the mobility of girls whose parents were already accepting of their daughter riding a bicycle, but that effect was not found on girls whose parents were not accepting of that.