Bamboo Bicycles

In the summer of 2009, the Yonso Project began a partnership with Bamboosero to establish a bamboo bicycle workshop in one of our communities, Apaah. The shop's workers, or "bambooseros", will build bike frames to be sold to customers in the US through Calfee Design. The demand for these lightweight, high-quality bikes in the US is very high, and the workshop is assured that it will receive production orders for the foreseeable future. Most materials will come from Ghanaian sources (including the bamboo, which grows plentifully across the country).

This project will address three critical problems in rural Ghana. The first is unemployment. The employees of the shop will be making a sizable wage and will receive health insurance for themselves and their family. Once trained as a bamboosero, an employee will have a stable, sustainable source of income; meanwhile, the shop will also provide revenue for our own scholarship and microlending programs.

Second, the jobs provided by this workshop will help to preserve the environment around Yonso. We are employing individuals who previously made a living through illegal logging or poaching in the forests of the region. When given the choice, most men would much prefer to find a wage-paying job instead of poaching or logging.

Finally, our bike workshop will address the lack of transportation in rural Ghana. Better transportation means improved access to schools, jobs, medical services, and so forth. The skills the bambooseros are acquiring through their employment will allow them to construct bikes for use in Ghana as well as for exportation to the US. The goal of Calfee Design and Bamboosero is to popularize bamboo bikes as a cheap, practical, carbon-neutral means of transportation in the developing world, and the Yonso Project is proud to be working towards that goal as well.

The workshop's first three bambooseros were trained in October 2009 by Craig Calfee, owner of Calfee Designs and inventor of the bamboo bike frame. (The YP workshop is only one of several in Ghana sponsored by Mr. Calfee; please see the Bamboosero website for details.) When operating at full capacity, the shop will employ up to ten bambooseros.

Please check out the pictures below from the October training session in Apaah!