LUX Loves: Cycle for a Cause
On a trip to Africa, Craig Calfee got inspired to bring his bamboo bike-making across the Atlantic. Stimulating Ghana’s economy, the initiative called Bamboosero, gives Ghanian artisans $150 for every bike they manufacture. The frames are built from locally grown bamboo and then taken back to the shop where Calfee and his team add the necessary hardware to get it on the street. His next goal is to bring Bamboosero to other developing nations that could use the more local business.
Like the bike idea? These two other companies, Baisikeli and Worldbike, give back to impoverished nations with bike-based solutions.
Baisikeli (bicycle in Swahili) takes second-hand bikes from Denmark and donates them to regions in Africa such as Ghana, Sierra Leone and Tanzania. The local handlers in Africa receive the bikes from Copenhagen, are trained on how to repair them and then sell them to distributors in the area. Although they are second-hand, they are remarkably better quality than the domestic products found in Africa and bought at a fraction of the price.
Worldbike has a different mission than Bamboosero or Baisikeli, who focus on redistributing used goods to the poor of Africa. Instead, Worldbike designs brand-new inexpensive bikes that can handle large loads and rough terrain, distributing them all over the world from Cuba to Cambodia. It’s an important perspective since everything from emergency technicians to postal workers use bikes as their main form of transportation in developing nations.
Tagged in: charity, copenhagen, non-profit, bike, bamboosero, africa, ghana, donation, denmark, baisikeli, world bike, second-hand,
