Funded by the European Union and the Common Fund for Commodities, the INBAR initiative is the first to transfer bamboo charcoal technologies from China to sub-Saharan Africa to produce 'green' biofuels using locally available bamboo, which is indigenous to many parts of the continent, instead of forest wood - on which around 80 percent of sub-Saharan Africa's rural population depends for fuel.
Coosje Hoogendoorn, director-general of INBAR, told SciDev.Net that initial projects were launched in Ethiopia and Ghana in 2009, helping train people in bamboo cultivation, best bamboo firewood practices and bamboo charcoal production. The challenge now is to scale-up and spread the technology to other parts of Africa, Hoogendoorn said, adding that the project has been "looking primarily at African [bamboo] species". "Given the fact that there is a lot of bamboo in Africa and that it is indigenous, we can build on that base to make bamboo a viable alternative for the totally unsustainable firewood charcoal [that is used] at the moment."
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