Grass Roots: Building with Bamboo

With a little help from their friends, Nicaraguans are building better lives—out of bamboo

Jan Van Bilsen first got the idea for his company after visiting Colombia. There, he saw elegant homes of two, three and even four storeys—all made from bamboo. How is this possible, he wondered? Turns out, with a little knowledge and practice, constructing with bamboo is relatively easy. Bamboo is also much cheaper than wood, which may explain why it’s used in developing countries for all types of constructions— homes, bridges, furniture, tools. Van Bilsen, a Belgian who has lived in Nicaragua for 25 years, was so awestruck that he founded BambuCasa, a small, for-profit company that harvests the timber-like bamboo and sells it for housing across Nicaragua.

Now two years in operation, BambuCasa is playing a small but symbolic role in a new and emerging Nicaragua: it’s using business to alleviate poverty, not only by providing jobs but also an affordable material for housing. And this small Central American country needs a lot of new housing. According to the Chronic Poverty Research Centre, while 80 percent of Nicaraguans own their own homes, the quality is often very poor and there’s a need for an estimated 500,000 more. Decades of political conflict and economic instability have made the country one of the poorest in the Western hemisphere. Yet Nicaragua also holds great promise: it’s a lush, tropical country with bountiful bamboo and, importantly, the manpower to harvest it and build with it (almost half the population is under the age of 30).

Van Bilsen and his small team of five full-time employees travel the countryside looking for bamboo that they can buy from landowners who are unwittingly growing this untapped resource. “Bamboo is such an impressive plant,” he says. “It can grow 20 to 30 metres tall, seven to eight inches in diameter.” Moreover, because it’s a grass, bamboo is very eco-friendly—when its stalk is cut it simply grows another, to full height, in about three to five years. When the time is right—after a full moon, says Van Bilsen, when the stalks are drier, and have less sugar and starch to attract insects—the team cuts the bamboo, then takes it to the BambuCasa factory in Managua, where it’s soaked, dried and treated for sale as a building material.

Van Bilsen admits transitioning from filmmaker (his past profession) to businessman has been a challenge. He loves the field work, but not the running of a business and the management of employees. Thankfully he’s not alone: helping him become a better businessman are MBAs Without Borders (MWB) of Canada and Agora Partnerships from the United States—two non-profit groups with a shared vision, namely that supporting entrepreneurs like Van Bilsen in developing countries is the next big step in fighting global poverty. Both Tal Dehtiar of MWB and Ben Powell of Agora, whose groups offer free business consultancy services, say that providing jobs is the best way of lifting people out of poverty; for every person a business employs, a whole family can be fed, sheltered and educated. Powell says Agora took a chance on BambuCasa because it met its criteria of creating good, sustainable jobs—any venture it backs has to be about more than making money—through an environmentally sound business. In fact, Agora was so impressed with Van Bilsen it agreed to fund BambuCasa and has an equity stake in the company. Equity may mean more capital for future growth.) Meanwhile, MWB sent a business volunteer to help the company develop its operations, pricing and infrastructure.

What MWB and Agora are really doing, says Dehtiar, is addressing “the missing middle” of business growth in developing countries—helping enterprises too big for micro-financing and too small for loans from traditional investors like banks. According to the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs, a powerhouse of social investors seeking to help developing economies, smaller businesses are always “the engine of economic growth” in higher-income countries because they typically account for 60 percent of new jobs. Thus, to bring poorer economies in line with richer ones, investors need to take chances on local entrepreneurs and businesses with potential, even if they’re unproven. “Instead of being a banker to the poor,” says Powell, “you’re being a venture capitalist to growing businesses.”

Van Bilsen admits that without Agora’s capital, BambuCasa likely wouldn’t exist. And Dehtiar says the hope is that this little company will eventually employ at least 20 to 50 people. Slowly, he adds, it’s getting there. A production schedule for harvesting the bamboo has been devised and good financial practices and marketing strategies implemented. Efforts have also been made to seek out new customers and clients. Van Bilsen says he now gets at least three calls a day about building with bamboo, and often sends his team to teach people how to do it.

Nicaraguans are still suspicious, but Van Bilsen tells skeptics this story: The first house BambuCasa helped build was quite close to one being built from cement. “Every morning the man building the cement house said to me, ‘You fool, your little house will be blown away by the first hurricane!’” Van Bilsen was so certain of bamboo’s strength and elasticity he made him a bet: come the next great storm the bamboo house would survive, the brick house would not. Three months later, guess who won the bet?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Travel Cares. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Add to del.icio.us.