Zambikes team members at the factory in Zambia holding one of their bamboo bicycles. Photo:Zambikes.org

*This article was republished by The Christian Science Monitor.*

Zambikes has been helping Africans get around on locally-made bikes since 2007. Now they want to get the rest of the world rolling, too, but with a twist: these new cycles are almost 100 percent bamboo.

Zambia, where Zambikes is based, ranks a staggeringly low 150 out of 169 on the UNDP’s Human Development Index. Vaughn Spethmann and Dustin McBride witnessed the company’s dire economic straits and high unemployment rate first-hand during a 2004 university trip and founded Zambikes upon their return to the U.S., according to The American. Believing business to be the best way to remedy the country’s woes, they wanted their new company to “employ and empower the uneducated and underprivileged,” Spethmann told Social Capital Markets Europe. Spethmann says that as of May 2011, "Zambikes has distributed more than 8,000 bicycles, 900 bicycle ambulances and cargo carts, supplied much-needed spare parts, sold upwards of 200 bamboo bicycle frames worldwide and have employed more than 100 Zambians." Zambians who use the cargo cart can increase daily earning from $2 a day to $20, he said.

Zambikes wants to expand overseas, and they plan to do so sustainably. In addition to the metal bikes they produce in Africa, they now export bamboo bicycles to the United States. Bamboo is exceedingly easy to grow and can shoot up 2 inches an hour under the right conditions, according to PlanetGreen.com. It’s flexible and light, and the bikes made from it can be put together using basic tools and machinery, according to the BBC. Some might question the structural integrity of a bamboo bicycle, but the bikes’ proponents say they’re just as sturdy as the traditional metal frames. The Guardian’s GreenLiving Blog took one of Calfee’s bamboo models out for a spin in 2009 and found that it was comfortable, with great shock absorption. If you need to see it to believe it, check out this video of three large men piling onto a bamboo bike made in Ghana.

Zambikes isn’t the only company getting in on the action, though. Bamboosero and the Bamboo Bike Project are also trying to help Africans ride to economic prosperity. Now those in the market for a shiny new cycle can get a killer set of wheels and help support African entrepreneurs, too.

Margo Conner is a senior at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, majoring in international affairs. Read her other contributions to Global Envision.

Washington, D.C.’s bike sharing program has 1,100 bikes. London’s system has 6,000. And Paris has more than 20,000.

But on the other side of the globe, Hangzhou, China has them beat with more than 60,000, according to a recent report by National Geographic.

To see how it all works, check out this short from Streetfilms:

Bike shares -- where a user can pick up a bicycle at one service point, ride it, and then drop it off at another and walk away -- are growing in popularity. China, along with many other developing nations, has a long-held cultural tie to bicycling. Demand for automobiles skyrocketed in recent decades, but in a city of 6.7 million like Hangzhou, it would be impossible to build enough roads to support this, not to mention environmental concerns.

Bike shares are cheap (nearly free for many in Hangzhou), highly accessible, and part of a sustainable urban growth model. Hangzhou hopes to expand its system to 120,000 bikes by 2020 and other cities are taking notice of its success. Companies in Beijing, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City are making a go of it and hope to remove the training wheels soon.