For more than a decade, we’ve been proud to support Transaid in their mission to transform lives through safe, available and sustainable transport across sub-Saharan Africa. From professional driver training to emergency healthcare access, their work tackles transport challenges in a part of the world that needs it most.

We work with Transaid throughout the year to raise vital funds and awareness – from cycle challenges to the Transaid Cup. Earlier this month, with the help of our guests at the Driver of Year Awards, we raised over £7,000 in just a few hours from the generous donations made on our Charity Raffle.

Every pound connects to something real: a trained driver, a safer journey, a bicycle ambulance, a mother reaching care in time.

Our Chief Revenue Officer, Mike Blackburn had the opportunity to see first-hand what this really means when he visited Zambia this May.

“First, the roads.

We drove roughly 400 kilometres to reach one of the rural communities. Along the way we passed multiple overturned trucks. A flatbed on its side in the grass. A cab buried nose first into the verge. Fuel tankers and container lorries thundering past. Crumbling tarmac. Police trucks packed with people riding on the open back.

And in between all of this: children. Walking to school. Kids selling food at the side of the road, right on the edge of carriageway.

The return journey from one of the villages took eight hours to cover that same 400 kilometres. And at night it gets worse. Bikes with no lights. Children in dark clothing still out working. No street lighting. No pavements. Just the road and the dark and people trying to get by. I genuinely do not know how more people are not killed every single night.

It is relentless and it is dangerous. And it makes the work of the Industrial Training Centre (ITC), which we also visited, land with real weight. Watching trucks lined up on the ITC training ground, each one marked “Caution: Driver Under Instruction,” knowing that better trained drivers on those roads means fewer of those crashes, fewer children at risk on those roadsides. It hits differently when you’ve just driven past the evidence yourself.”

“We arrived in the village to the sound of singing and dancing. This wasn’t a curated event with a select few. The whole community had come out; seated under the canopy of trees in a dappled woodland clearing: no building, no chairs for most – just a community, united.

They sang for us. They danced. They cooked us food. And then, with extraordinary grace and humility, they asked for more help. More bicycle ambulances. Not a demand, just a quiet, dignified request from people who know exactly what one more ambulance means in a community like theirs.

Transaid’s Emergency Transport Scheme (ETS) provides bicycle ambulances to rural communities in Zambia to get pregnant women to health facilities in time. With no ambulances, facilities can be miles away, and the only route there is through bush or along a dirt track at best. Volunteers, men and women from the community itself, are trained as riders and custodians. They’re on call. They show up. They get there when it matters.

We heard from mothers who had used the service. One by one they stood up and spoke. Complications during labour. Miles from the nearest clinic. No way to get there. And then the bicycle ambulance arrived. Babies who are alive today because a volunteer pedalled through the dark and got there in time.
I can’t do justice in words to what it felt like to hear those stories. The pride in their voices. The matter of fact way they described situations that, for most of us, would be unimaginable emergencies.

I also had a go on one of the bicycle ambulances. I’ll be honest, it was hard work, and I was in a clearing. Dirt ground, uneven and bumpy, and I was already struggling. Now imagine doing that through bush, no roads, dirt tracks at best, in the dark, with a woman in labour in the cart behind you…that’s what these volunteers actually do. The dedication of those riders is something else entirely.”

“The second village visit brought one of those moments that you don’t forget. We were again gathered under the trees, listening to mothers share their stories, women celebrating the lives the bicycle ambulance had saved, when one of them received news that her child had just been in a road accident.

Despite everything, despite every effort, they couldn’t save him.

She had been dancing moments before.

That’s the world these communities live in, where joy and grief are separated by a single piece of news, and where the everyday dangers of just being near a road are lethal. It was harrowing. It was also a stark reminder of why everything Transaid does matters, from the bicycle ambulances right back to the truck driver training programme we’d seen earlier.”

“We visited one of the rural clinics. The equipment tells its own story: a pair of scales, a rusting metal bed, a bucket on the floor for the placenta. This clinic saves lives. It does so with almost nothing.

A mother’s hospital bag in this part of Zambia often contains a razor blade and a pair of rubber gloves, her own, because supplies are limited and having a clean blade and fresh gloves to cut the umbilical cord falls to her. Let that sit for a moment alongside whatever was in your last hospital bag, or the last time you were near a maternity unit.

The GRZ Ministry of Health shirts worn by the volunteers say it plainly: “No Woman Should Die While Giving Life.” That’s not a slogan. That is the daily reality these communities are fighting against, and the daily commitment of the people working alongside Transaid to change it.”

“Microlise exists in the world of transport and logistics. We build the tools that help fleets operate more safely, more efficiently, more sustainably. That’s our job, and we’re proud of it.

But spending time in Zambia, really seeing what transport poverty looks like, what the absence of proper driver training costs, what happens when a woman in rural Africa has no way to reach a clinic. It connects everything we do to something much bigger.

Transaid are doing extraordinary work. The ITC is training professional drivers properly. The ETS volunteers are saving lives on bicycles, through bush and dirt tracks at night.”

“In Q1 this year alone, 20 new bicycle ambulances were deployed, 46 existing ones were repaired, and 8 new riders trained. These aren’t large numbers in a spreadsheet. Each one of those ambulances belongs to a specific community, and each rider is someone who put their hand up and said “I’ll do it.”

Over the last decade, Microlise has raised over £260,000 for Transaid. So if you’ve ever been at our conference, or ever dropped something in a Transaid charity raffle, know that you have made a difference.

On paper, I understood what Transaid did: safe and sustainable transport, emergency healthcare access, driver training. I understood it. I just didn’t feel it. Not until now.

I went to Zambia to understand. I came back knowing I can’t unknow what I’ve seen.”

To find out more about Transaid and how to support their work, visit transaid.org.