MNN - Mother Nature Network

But a sustainable economic development project hopes to make bamboo bikes ubiquitous in sub-Saharan Africa: Bamboo Bike Project wants to build sustainable, eco-friendly bikes using bamboo — to create a sustainable form of transportation for poor Africans in rural areas — and to create a sustainable bike building industry in Africa to satisfy local needs (via Tiny Choices).

Success of the Bamboo Bike Project will mean the establishment and growth of a vast network of bamboo bicycle factories, which will each produce upwards of 20,000 bamboo bicycles annually for local distribution. The high levels of production and sale required by this model will more substantially improve the state of rural transportation, and will have a greater capacity to impact wider economic markets (potentially lowering the cost of other forms of effective transportation for rural residents even further). Larger factories will produce job opportunities that yield economic growth, and will be able to ensure quality control of our finished product.

While we could encourage the growth of roadside or village level bicycle building, that approach could never meet a need at a level anywhere approaching 5-50 million bikes. That strategy would likely just increase the fortunes of a few roadside bicycle builders, and the transportation situation would remain unchanged ... We must not fall into the trap of helping to start yet another small business that will do little but create a few interesting bikes, do nothing for poverty in rural areas and nothing for the economies of those countries that would benefit from bike manufacturing.