Desert terrain has slowed the pace of infrastructure development in Ghana's northern reaches, and few teachers have much desire to be assigned to elementary or secondary schools in that region largely due to poor transportation services. As one way of offsetting the teacher shortage, Ghana's education ministry and the local JICA representative office hit upon the idea of supplying bicycles to teachers assigned to schools in the north. That idea was relayed to the Japanese embassy, and ultimately led to the creation of an official plan to send bicycles to teachers in three northern states.

Word of the plan prompted the Fukushima JOCV Training Association (a Japanese NGO) to offer to furnish the bicycles required. A large number of abandoned bicycles that had been collected and fully refurbished by that organization were eventually exported to Ghana with Japanese grant assistance for grassroots projects. Once in Ghana, they were loaned out to teachers in areas with particularly bad transportation infrastructure by the Catholic Relief Service, a U.S. NGO highly experienced with the situation in the northern part of the country. One of the distinguishing features of the whole project is that it worked by combining Japanese ODA with the collaboration of two NGOs: one Japanese, the other American.

The ceremony marking the delivery of 145 refurbished bicycles and scenes of the bicycles being loaned out to teachers were widely covered by Ghanaian newspapers and other local media organizations, triggering a stream of thank-you letters from numerous boards of education up north. With ODA, many once-abandoned bicycles in Japan have been recycled, refurbished, and given a new lease on life as valuable means of transport for teachers throughout northern Ghana.

Shaking hands behind a fleet of donated bicycles are Mr. Suzuki, counselor of the Japanese Embassy in Ghana (center), and Mr. Kronin, head of the Catholic Relief Service. Ghanaian Vice-Minister of Education Mr. Chele is standing at left