Bamboo Bikes for Poor

Who would have thought that inside the Zen essence of bamboo lay the potential to help a poverty-stricken continent create bicycles?

David Ho, a research scientist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, is currently working with his colleague, John Mutter, on a project to start a bamboo bicycle-making industry in Africa to provide transportation for local residents. Ho first received the idea from Craig Calfee, a bicycle builder in California who 11 years ago built a bicycle with a bamboo frame for publicity.

Calfee explained that bamboo bicycles have been built before but never reached commercial success because their construction was weak. He decided to build his first bamboo bicycle after playing with his dog, who liked to play tug-of-war with sticks. "She would hold onto the stick as you swung her around by it. She came to me with a piece of bamboo and demonstrated how tough it was by this method," he said.

Initially, bamboo seems to be an odd choice of material. "It's not the state-of-the-art material," Ho noted. "It's a step towards them eventually being able to make bikes out of steel or whatever else the developed world uses." Yet bamboo is surprisingly strong-twenty-story-high scaffolding in Hong Kong has been known to be built out of only bamboo and hemp.

According to Ho, a bamboo bicycle industry would be relatively easy to establish, since making bamboo frames require none of the more complex tools that conventional bicycles require. He noted that bamboo frames can be made with a Swiss army knife.

Establishing a local bicycle industry would benefit local habitants in two major ways, Ho said. It would not only provide adequate transportation, but also provide a sustainable industry. The bicycles that are currently used are inappropriate for the local terrain and are either donated from developed countries or imported from China or India.

Calfee estimated that a bamboo bicycle would cost between $30 and $75, depending on the components used.

Ho and fellow researchers plan on taking their initiative to Ghana first. "We wanted to go to a place with a relatively stable government so we have a chance to make this work-a place with a little bit of infrastructure. You don't want to jump into the most difficult situation you can imagine," Ho explained.

The biggest challenge the team will face is to make the idea feasible and to create micro-businesses that people there can run. There are also other logistical matters to deal with, such as laws governing the harvesting of bamboo and establishing a supply chain for the bicycle parts.

It will take a couple of years for the project to be fully functional. The team plans to make a trip to Africa in May to do more research, familiarize themselves with the people and the area, and establish contacts. By fall, they hope to have built a prototype and plan on demonstrating to local people how to build bamboo bicycles.

"You've got to be optimistic about these things, in terms of development and all that, to make things work," Ho said. "There are so many hurdles and challenges that everything is daunting, but if you actually give in to all these hurdles, nothing will ever get done. I'm optimistic that we can make a difference and at least part of the population will find us useful."