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.

The African Growth and Opportunity Act has generated many jobs in the clothing manufacturing sector, especially for women. Photo: Jenny Bussey Vaughan/Mercy Corps

Most Americans may have never heard of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, but their closets probably contain at least one article of clothing imported as part of it.

The act — AGOA, by its acronym — was passed by Congress in 2000. It’s a free-trade deal between the U.S. and a number of Sub-Saharan African nations that eliminates quotas and duties for certain goods. It allows African products to compete with those from other regions on a more level playing field on the U.S. market. 87 percent of these imports consist of petroleum and minerals, according to a report by the Council on Foreign Relations. That’s not all, though, as Florizelle Lizer, the assistant U.S. trade representative for Africa explained to the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of International Information Programs:

The main focus of our efforts and our capacity-building assistance related to AGOA has always been to promote new nontraditional and value-added exports from Africa like apparel, footwear, processed agricultural products and manufactured goods.

This is where you’ll find AGOA’s selling point for the average Joe or Joanna in one of its member states. It’s created tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs, and many of these new employees are women. Some of the largest gains are in clothing manufacturing. For a poor, landlocked country like Lesotho, clothing exports tripled and 50,000 new jobs appeared following its entrance into AGOA, according to a report by Lawrence Edwards and Robert Lawrence. It’s also helping to empower women by providing them access to a regular income, comments Zambia News Features.

There’s a catch, though: AGOA says the materials used to make products exported to the U.S. must be manufactured in the exporting country or, at the very least, in another AGOA state. But being able to manufacture fabrics on an industrial scale is a tall order for developing nations that don’t already have that kind of infrastructure. Luckily for them, another piece was added to AGOA a few years after it debuted. It’s called the Third Country Fabric Rule, and it allows African countries to import their fabric from other parts of the world, manufacture the finished product at home, and then export it to the U.S. under AGOA.

The Third Country Rule doesn’t quite sync up with AGOA, and must be renewed more frequently. AGOA itself isn’t up for revision until 2015, while the Third Country Rule is set to expire in 2012. In May, AllAfrica reported that the U.S. had said that "its market would no longer be accepting garments whose raw materials could have been sourced from outside the exporting country." Since then, a U.S. congressman submitted a bill to extend the Rule until 2015, though an article from Forbes argues that recent U.S. actions concerning AGOA constitute a kind of "benign neglect."

Not everyone is in favor of AGOA in its current state, though. Some call it a fig leaf for the oil industry or a cap on the growth of African manufacturing. U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, is a supporter, but in a recent speech at the AGOA forum in Zambia she pointed out some of its shortcomings, according to Procurement News. She said African governments need to work on providing greater support to manufacturers — citing the example of an American business that chose to import from Vietnam instead of an AGOA because Vietnamese government subsidies meant that the factory there could churn out products more quickly. Clinton also criticized the fact that countries "export only a handful of the 6,500 products," eligible under AGOA, while "the most common export is still a barrel of oil." Others see the Third Country Rule as actually stunting the growth of local textile industries. It might be cheaper to import from Asia in the short run, but local businesses could suffer the long-term.

But in the minds of many, allowing the rule to lapse — or even threatening to let it do so — makes investors nervous and hurts countries’ long-term prospects. Here’s hoping congressional inaction concerning your clothing’s origin won’t cost an African woman the shirt off her back.

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

A young girl walking on the outskirts of Kibera, the largest slum in Africa. Photo: subcomandanta (flickr)

More than $50 billion of foreign aid is given to African countries every year to address poverty on the continent. Although this may seem generous, and to some a solid strategy to treat Africa’s ailments, Dambisa Moyo — a Zambian economist with a background that includes Harvard, Oxford and Goldman Sachs — says just the opposite.

In her new book, Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is Another Way for Africa, Moyo claims that foreign aid has been "an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster.”

In a recent op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, Moyo writes that although she isn’t completely against humanitarian aid, she doesn’t believe "charity-based aid" can provide long-term sustainable development for Africa. Her biggest issue is with “government-to-government aid,” and funds from large monetary institutions like the World Bank. Moyo says the $60 trillion of this aid that's been given in the past 60 years is not working, evident from the fact that the number of Africans who live on less than $1 day has doubled in the last 20 years. And most foreign government aid, she argues, has been pocketed by corrupt politicians.

Trade, foreign investments and microfinance opportunities can provide a better future for Africans, Moyo said in an interview with the New York Times.

As expected, Dambisa Moyo’s claims have come under fire. In an interview with Newsweek, ONE Campaign co-founder Jamie Drummond says “Dead Aid” is “a poor polemic, with nothing new of substance, filled with anecdotal micro examples which ignore mountains of evidence." Madeleine Bunting from the Guardian calls Moyo’s claims “poorly argued” with “frequent pre-emptory glib conclusions.”

I wanted to get another perspective on Dambisa Moyo's assertions regarding the effects of foreign aid on Africa. So I asked Laura Miller — Program Officer for Central Africa at Mercy Corps — to respond to some of Moyo's claims based on her experience in the international-aid business, including stints in the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.