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Bernice Dapaah: The Woman Who Created Bicycles With Bamboo Sticks
Aug 8, 2020
Bernice Dapaah loves the idea of reusing bamboo to promote sustainable cycling. As one of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders, Dapaah launched the Ghana Bamboo Bikes Initiative, a social enterprise that employs most women to build bicycles from bamboo.
The bikes are exported all over the world, the World Economic Forum reported.
“The reason we use bamboo to manufacture bicycles is because it’s found abundantly in Ghana and this is not a material we’re going to import,” Dapaah, who’s the executive director of the Ghana Bamboo Initiative said.
“It’s a new innovation. There were no existing bamboo bike builders in our country, so we were the first people trying to see how best we could utilize the abundant bamboo in Ghana.”
There are about seven species of bamboo in Ghana, covering some 300,000 hectares about 5% of Ghana’s forest land. 
Despite the abundance of bamboo in the country, which Dapaah calls “a miracle plant”, for every bamboo plant that fell to make a bike, the Ghana Bamboo Bikes Initiative plants 10 more.
Bamboo is said to be stronger than steel in regards to the tensile strength. Steel has a tensile strength of 23,000 pounds per square inch. But bamboo surpasses steel with a noticeable lead at 28,000 pounds.
Knowing how helpful a shorter journey to school can be to academic performance, Dapaah’s Ghana Bamboo Bikes Initiative is helping students save time on walking to school so they have more time to learn by donating some of the bikes to a schoolchild each time a bike is sold.
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