Riding Out of Poverty on a Bamboo Bike

If you are poor, you walk: to school, to collect water, to find firewood, to go to town, to work, to farm your field, to get crops to your family, to get any excess crops you may grow to a market, to buy goods from the store, to get health care, to go to funerals. The distances can be vast and the time involved can be a huge burden on the lives of the poor. If you are a poor woman you walk balancing a head load, a technique that you learned as a child and will practice most of your life.

In sub-Saharan Africa you can pretty much tell a person’s level of prosperity by the way he gets around. Only the wealthy have motorized vehicles and few people use them for the luxury of mere personal transportation. Mostly they are used for the essentials of commerce, even though commerce may be operating at a very modest level.
And there is a diabolical reverse effect. If you are poor, it is very likely you will be walking. But if you have no vehicle and are compelled to walk, your opportunity to enter the market economy, such that it is, is severely limited. If you can only grow enough of a cash crop to put on your back and carry to a market you will never progress. You will always be unhealthy because your access to health care is restricted and if you are unhealthy you can’t work effectively (or learn at school if you are young). So the poverty that gives you no option but to walk, also ensures that you will stay poor. The poorest face numerous feedbacks in which poverty itself begets further poverty.

If the poor can be made more mobile, some relief might be possible; the transportation-based poverty trap might be broken. In all the poorest parts of the world and particularly sub-Saharan Africa, one of the ubiquitous forms of transportation is the bicycle. Bicycles provide the means for almost all transportation needs. They are seldom used to get a person from place to place just because it’s easier that way. They provide the means of everything from taking farm products to market to taking pregnant women to hospital. Bicycles can be a particular benefit to women who fill more roles than men, being income generators, housekeepers, and managers in their communities. In poor rural areas it is the women and, more often, young girls who are charged with collecting water and firewood. On foot these activities take hours, preventing them from obtaining schooling and condemning them to repeat the lives of their mothers, marrying locally and young and having large numbers of children while risking their lives with every pregnancy. In the poorer parts of the world, female illiteracy is often 10 times greater than male illiteracy. The time burden of performing these basic collection tasks in areas of scarcity prevents girls from going to school and seals their fates. Bicycles can help.

There are hundreds of thousands of bicycles in poor countries, perhaps millions. But there are two main problems. First, they are heavy upright designs meant for the personal transportation of middle class people on smooth clear roads—not for the myriad uses to which they are put. Like so much else, modern bicycle designs have not come to Africa. While the rest of the world is riding bikes with suspensions and disk brakes, Africans ride bikes designed in the 1930s. Second, none of these bikes are built in Africa despite the evident critical need. They are almost all imported from China where they are produced by the thousands in large factories. The product is cheap in both cost and quality. They have poor running gear, especially brakes. They are dangerous and every year they cause numerous fatalities.

We (Dr. David Ho at Lamont-Doherty, Craig Calfee—a bicycle designer from California—and myself) have been promoting an innovative solution. Bicycles can be built with bamboo frame sections. They are amazingly strong and light and can be designed for any purpose. In June, we taught local craftsmen in Accra, Ghana how to build a bamboo-framed bike with parts bought in the local market and bamboo grown in Ghana. No power tools were used—important because most poor areas of Africa lack access to power. The joins are made with a fiber soaked in epoxy resin much the way very high-end carbon fiber bikes are built. Bamboo is a sustainable crop and grows throughout the southern parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Three-year old bamboo is fine for bike frames so it can be produced as a sustainable crop. The metal parts like handlebars, chains, wheels, etc. can be bought in local markets and are imported from China or can be scavenged from old bikes cut up in the U.S. Everyone has an old bike in the garage with parts that are excellent for this use. Every bamboo bike can be made to a unique design, not just for the size of the rider, but also for the intended purpose. The bike we built in Ghana is a cargo bike in which the cargo-carrying frame is integral to the bike frame itself, not an add-on. It is ideal for moving farm products around in poor road conditions. Another, lighter design would allow women to collect water and firewood very quickly so they can achieve their tasks before school. In the northern parts of Ghana the society is dominantly Muslim. We can design a bike that will allow women in long robes to become mobile.

A bamboo bike will not make the poor rich. But it can relieve the burden of poverty, particularly on rural lives and on women in many important ways and release a vast number of people from a trap that is part of the cause of their harsh lives, and from which they are unable to extricate themselves. And these bikes can be built in Africa, for Africans, by Africans and hence can become the kernel of an African bike building industry that will satisfy local needs with local products.

The author is a professor of earth and environmental sciences and is the deputy director of the Earth Institute.