The bicycle is the most available and reliable type of transport in many parts of Africa, used for everything from moving house to taking the sick to hospital. The Bamboo Bike Project aims to help more people become mobile, using bikes built, as its name suggests, from bamboo ? an abundant and sustainable resource. In the process it will stimulate a bike-building industry, generating income and boosting local economies.

Craig Calfee of Calfee Design, a California-based company that makes hi-tech racing and mountain bikes for professional cyclists, came up with the idea of the bamboo bike when he visited Africa in 1984.

Most people in the areas he visited relied on bicycles to get around, because they were the most practical and affordable mode of transport, given the state of the roads and the limited income of most households.

The bicycles used were imported and designed for well-paved, smooth roads ? rare in rural Africa. And Calfee saw that neither bicycles nor roads were in sufficient supply.

An abundance of bamboo

Calfee also noticed that bamboo, a member of the grass family, grew prolifically in equatorial Africa. Bamboo is both flexible and extremely strong, and Calfee, who always uses innovative materials for his bike frames, though it would be ideal for bike construction.

According to the expert bike-builder, a bamboo frame is similar to an aluminium one in both stiffness and weight. Bamboo's vibration-damping characteristics are closer to carbon fibre, but it absorbs a lot more vibration from an uneven road.

And if people were taught to build the bicycles locally there would be great potential for employment, not only from a thriving bike-building industry but because transport in developing countries often helps create employment. With goods moving more easily from source to vendor, regional trade would be opened up.

The raw material would be freely available and wouldn't need industrialisation for its exploitation, so non-industrialised communities would benefit too. Only a few parts would need to be imported ? Calfee estimated that a container with a capacity for 500 complete bicycles could hold parts for 2000. The bamboo frame construction and final assembly would be done locally.

One benefit was that a supply of electricity and availability of power tools would not be needed, although access to power would speed up the rate of production. Otherwise all that was required were hand tools and a quantity of resin and sisal fibre.

Getting the project going: See page two.