Today, most bikes are shipped to Africa from China, which means that these impoverished areas are further economically weakened through a dependence on a transportation option that is imported from elsewhere. The ultimate goal of the Bamboo Bike Project is to teach people to make their own bikes out of bamboo, and thus a means to start a locally oriented, sustainable business.
     As of now, the prevalent issue is scale: thus far, only a few bikes have been made at a time. “Our objective is to make a run of 800 bikes, and to try to do that in the next couple of months,” Mutter says. He hopes that the initial attempt at mass production will give them “a sense of where the problems are, and also how to overcome them.” Let’s hope this novel idea sprouts into a viable solution.