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    Bam­boo farm­ers' pa­tience pays off as mar­kets open up

    kenya bambo1A com­pany in Kenya is train­ing rural and urban com­munit­ies on grow­ing bam­boo, propagat­ing, har­vest­ing and mak­ing products, giv­ing in­come to hun­dreds and of­fer­ing a vi­able al­tern­at­ive to wood that has be­come ex­pens­ive in mak­ing fur­niture.

    Kenya Bam­boo Cen­ter, which is now work­ing with groups in Koro­gocho, Hur­uma, Em­bakasi and Suba area in Nyanza trains farm­ers to ap­pre­ci­ate the won­ders of bam­boo farm­ing, and the mar­ket for the over 1500 products that can be de­rived from the tree.

    The pro­ject which happened by chance after its man­ager  Pol­ly­curp Akoko Mboyah lost a job in the civil  ser­vice after hav­ing worked for 11 years not only has however been deal­ing with the her­culean task of pop­ular­iz­ing a tree that takes between two to five years to ma­ture, in a so­ci­ety used to quick re­turns. “The first group we dealt with in Hur­uma and which was our pilot pro­ject was such a tough task. While the group mem­bers warmed up to the idea at first, they pa­tience died down when after an year they still could not har­vest the tree. They had been used to get­ting in­stant in­come. They ended up up­root­ing the trees,” said Mboyah.

    But Mboyah said those who have braved on now know the be­ne­fit of farm­ing the bam­boo and are reap­ing from it.

    The cen­ter sells seed­lings to the farm­ers, then trains the farm­ers on good man­age­ment prac­tices of the tree in­clud­ing propaga­tion, wa­ter­ing, when and how to har­vest to en­sure that the final wood is hard enough. “Again there has been a prob­lem with har­vest­ing the wood by some farm­ers. So we train them how to har­vest, dry the wood first and make sure that the final product is good enough to sell to cli­ents. It makes all the dif­fer­ence in de­term­in­ing whether a cli­ent will come back,” Mboyah added.

    The com­pany has gone fur­ther and im­por­ted a vari­ety of mod­ern and bet­ter matur­ing seeds which they are rais­ing as seed­lings in their nurs­er­ies with a view to in­tro­duce it to the farm­ers.

    Ac­cord­ing to Mboyah the mar­ket for bam­boo has grown tre­mend­ously in the re­cent past, with the in­ter­na­tional mar­ket look­ing at Africa to sup­ply the raw and fin­ished products.

    In­fact Mboyah's first seeds were given to him by an Italian so­cial en­tre­pren­eur who was work­ing on a bam­boo pro­ject in Hur­uma.

    A Now­er­gian com­pany, Wa­ter­storm, work­ing with the Green­Belt Move­ment has also planted two acres of bam­boo in Maragua area of Mur­ang'a county, with a view to har­vest­ing the bam­boo to make floor­ing tiles. Kenya Bam­boo Cen­ter is work­ing with the com­pany to cre­ate mar­ket for its groups.

    But Mboyah want to train farm­ers to make low cost bam­boo products tailored for the local mar­ket to get them to ap­pre­ci­ate the mon­et­ary value of the tree. “We want to train them to make products that have a high de­mand loc­ally like cook­ing sticks, cha­pati rolls and table mats for starters. Already we have re­ceived or­ders as far as Greece for table mats. The mar­ket has ex­pressed huge ap­pet­ite for bam­boo products,” Mboyah said.

    As a cham­pion of chan­ging per­cep­tion on the be­ne­fits of bam­boo farm­ing, Mboya has been walk­ing a tight rope in con­vin­cing farm­ers of the plants' be­ne­fits. In Suba area of Nyanza where a pro­ject was in­tro­duced to get the farm­ers to move from to­bacco farm­ing to cul­tiv­a­tion of bam­boo, farm­ers up­rooted the bam­boo trees three months after plant­ing for what they called ' not get­ting re­turns first.'

    But Mboyah in­sists that the over 200 bam­boo spe­cies are more than just trees and are key in en­vir­on­mental con­ser­va­tion by being able to ab­sorb up to 12 per cent of green­house gases like car­bon di­ox­ide, for every hec­tare. “The beauty with bam­boo again is that you can har­vest the same every year com­pared other trees,” he added.

    This would be wel­come news to the coun­try which has been reel­ing under acute short­age of tim­ber which has seen it turn to im­ports, and spend­ing over Sh3­bil­lion.

    Be­sides bridging the short­age, this would also open the en­tre­pren­eurs in the bam­boo busi­ness to an in­ter­na­tional mar­ket with an in­sa­ti­able ap­pet­ite, with the in­dustry's worth cur­rently stand­ing at $11 bil­lion an­nu­ally ac­cord­ing to the In­ter­na­tional Net­work for Bam­boo and Rat­tan (INBAR).

    China has per­fec­ted the bam­boo mar­ket and cur­rently re­mains the largest pro­du­cer glob­ally, at 80 per cent of all global pro­duc­tion, and using 60 per cent of it for local con­sump­tion.

    For more in­form­a­tion con­tact below:

    Pol­ly­curp Mboyah- Man­ager

    Cell­phone: 0713804236

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