Third Place Winner in the 2026 Entrepreneurship in Emerging Markets Global Case Writing Competition.
Riders for Health, an organization active in several African nations, aims to systematically bridge the transportation gap between healthcare providers and rural populations’ medical needs. Riders for Health administers fleets of government-owned motorcycles that can handle the typically rough conditions to deliver care and supplies. In the small nation of The Gambia, after more than two years of negotiation, a $3.5-million bank loan backed by a foundation’s deposit has enabled Riders for Health to buy its own new motorcycles. For the first time in Riders’ two-decade history, the organization owns a national health fleet outright. And now, Andrea Coleman, co-founder and chief executive officer, has to recommend whether Riders will grow through emphasizing Transport Asset Management (TAM), the organization’s new operating model with its own fleets, or its established Transport Resource Management (TRM) model, under which clients (i.e., governments) own the vehicles and Riders manages them for a cost-per-kilometer (CPK) fee.
The case asks students to choose among three strategic paths—TRM-first, TAM-first, or a staged TRM-to-TAM transition—and to specify the operational, financial, and institutional conditions under which each would be the right answer for a given country over the next decade. The decision highlights a recurring archetype in emerging-markets strategy: the choice between an asset-light model that scales quickly but leaves the firm exposed to asset decisions it does not control, and an asset-heavy model that offers greater control at the cost of balance-sheet exposure and dependence on capital-market infrastructure.