Bamboo Bikes: Charting a Path to Sustainability John Upton - Responding to Climate Change
go to original May 31, 2014

Ghana's abundant resources of bamboo gave an American engineer the idea of helping people get around cheaply: bikes made from bamboo - the ultimate green transport. (AFP)

Parked conspicuously in a conference’s exhibition hall in Cancun this week, between cubicles screening videos of case studies and offering piles of reports, was a rugged bicycle that was turning more heads than spokes.

The burly bicycle’s handsome brown frame was made mostly of bamboo. It’s a low-cost and fuel-free mode of transportation that was built as part of a grassroots initiative in Ghana that’s growing like a weed.

“In Africa, you can throw anything on the ground, and it will grow,” said Kemi Fadojutimi, a director of the Ghana Bamboo Bikes Initiative. “It’s the same with bamboo – bamboo grows everywhere, and we don’t do anything with it.”

From that realization grew an idea, which was fertilized in 2012 with a $30,000 grant.

The bike was hauled to the Global Environment Facility Assembly in Mexico to show off a success story of a small grants programme run by a group that administers billions of dollars worth of global pledges under various environmental treaties.

Since the GEF small grants programme’s first pilot projects in 1992, it has funneled $1 billion into 20,000 projects across more than 100 countries.

Read the rest at Responding to Climate Change

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!