East Bali Bamboo Bikes Social Enterprise Appeal

Our hopes last July that the Covid-19 pandemic would be quickly controlled and allow activities to return to normal by now have been dashed and although we’ve had no income, we could not lay off our dedicated small team of artisans who all have families to support. We are though pleased to report that we’ve all adapted to the “new normal”, life has continued and by following strict coronavirus protocols, our bamboo team, students in our 6 EBPP schools and our 19 Ban village communities remain safe and healthy.

A huge disappointment has been the recent upsurge of Covid infections in the UK since we sent our custom bike frames to our UK partner, Netham Bamboo, who were starting to fill their order book – but they’ve had to return to lockdown and no further orders yet. However, on the positive side, our bamboo team have kept busy with various activities summarised below.

Bamboo Marine Animals

In preparation for business opening in Germany, our team have made 20 sets of the beautiful marine life bamboo toys that our former interns had designed and started researching and promoting in Germany, which has not taken off due to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in March. We remain optimistic and are ready!

Children’s Skimboard Prototype

We were recently contacted by a new customer, and potential partner, (British) who lives in Bali and talked about the idea of making children's skimboards. Searching on the internet, we didn’t find any made from bamboo, yet. Therefore, we have been designing and are currently building prototypes for the skimboards and seeing if they work! If it does, then our customer will be helping us to put this product on the market. Our challenge is to minimise the weight and we hope that the Styrofoam ‘sandwich’ we’re piloting will achieve our goals. Wait for updates in our next report.

Supporting EBPP Health and Education Teams Monthly Food Supplement Distribution

Since school and community health posts closures in March, our bamboo team have played a key role in distribution of monthly food supplement packages to our 171 students and their families in the 6 remote mountain hamlets and nutritional food supplement for the dozens of malnourished infants that we support through our health outreach programmes. Thanks to this food support, no children have dropped out from school and many of the malnourished infants have improved body weight and health!

Komang and our bamboo team are using this quiet period to optimise non-productive land in and around our Tianyar workshop, including harvesting and planting Vetiver Grass (Chrysopogen zizanioides) in Tianyar nursery, preparing a vacant plot as an organic fruit and vegetable farm and improving ground water resources.

Our great progress reported in March took a severe hit when the COVID-19 took hold in Indonesia, prompting Bali’s Governor to instruct school closures on 16^th of March and total lockdown of Bali’s traditional communities on 31st of March! While some of our bamboo artisans from Ban village were required to stay in their respective mountain hamlets, we continued limited activities with a ‘skeleton’ team.

Bamboo Trainees Resume on 1^st July Building their First Bike Frames

Laid off from 1^st April till 30^th June during the pandemic lockdown, our graduates were excited to immediately resume hands-on training by preparing accurate drawings and then directly learning the main steps to build their first bamboo bike frame! (See photos)

Bamboo Wheelchairs Donated tomore Needy Disabled Children

On 16th April, we proudlyhanded over a custom made bamboo wheelchair to a severely disabled 12 year old girl in nearby Tianyar village, who is unable to speak but clearly suffered great discomfort in her old and damaged steel framed wheelchair, which was also far too big for her. A few days later, we provided our first prototype bamboo wheelchair, made as a trial for Bali Beach Wheels, to a 5 year old disabled boy, also in Tianyar. Fortunately, the size suits him perfectly after makinga few minor adjustments to make it more comfortable. 

Two more Custom Bamboo Bike Frames for UK

Working to new geometry from Bristol-based Netham Bamboo, our team completed 2 more beautiful frames in less than a week and shortly after getting the air freight quotes on 30^th March, all air cargo flights were stopped due to Covid-19 – and not yet resumed. However, that did not deter Netham from researching electric bikes and accordingly ordered a prototype frame, which we completed in Mid-April and is also sitting in our Denpasar office, wrapped and ready for shipping, hopefully quite soon!

Potential Partnership with Established Bali Bike Shop

An enquiry in mid-May from a well-established bike dealer in SE Bali resulted in the owner joining me to meet our expert bike builders in our Tianyar workshop on 28^th May with exciting results. He was so impressed with our team’s technical expertise, our well-equipped workshop and our many bamboo bike designs that he provided us with one of his best-selling imported steel bike frames for our team to build him a bamboo sample! He also loved our laminated bamboo mudguards and kiddies Balance bikes and proposed some modifications to enable lower prices – which we’re planning in the near future.

We hope that the COVID-19 crisis will soon be behind us and whilst we’ve kept all of our bamboo artisans employed full time, output has been very restricted and we urgently need donor support to enable us to replenish stocks maintain machines and seek new markets and bamboo bike and craft orders.

Many thanks to our GlobalGiving donors and we will contact you shortly with details of the GlobalGiving July 15^th Bonus day