The Kenya National Bamboo Workshop

1. Recap day 1
Bamboo international workshop

2. Session 1 – opening session
• The workshop a joint effort - MEWNR, KEFRI,
INBAR and KFS
• In the Vision 2030 – bamboo is recognised and
seen as an important resource for this country
• There is need to raise awareness on the
opportunities in the bamboo sector in Kenya and
Africa
• Expectations
– A good review of the status of the bamboo industry
– Identify sector stakeholders
– Identify ways to improve that coordination

3. Objectives and Expectations
• Overall objective: contribution to the development of
national bamboo sector plan
• Specific objective:
– Identify the policy and legislative gaps in support of
bamboo sector
– Receive and learn from case studies and experiences
– Raise awareness of key policy makers and investors to
create a more enabling policy and investment environment
• Expected outputs
– The government to enact bamboo policy with multi-
stakeholder support
– Increased investment and support in the sector
– By 2030 the bamboo sector will be contributing
significantly to Kenya’s land restoration, renewable energy,
poverty alleviation and industrial development goals

4. Session 2 – Policy
• Policy gaps listed and classified –
– socio- economic, technical, logistical and policy
• Research needed to generate data to guide
management, harvesting, utilisation and
marketing
• Improve an diversify utilisation of bamboo
• Given lessons from China
– Importance of long term and result based policies
– Firm ownership of policy
– Multi sector approach was highly beneficial

5. Session 3 – sustainable resource management
and landscape restoration
• Looked at opportunities for restoration in
Kenya – opportunities to map the bamboo
species
• The current status of the bamboo planting
material and field trials in Kenya
– Lessons learnt is that some sites were pretty
inaccessible – need trial sites that area strategic
• Bamboo tobacco replacement project – the
initiatives, and achievements

6. Session 4 – bamboo biomass for energy
• Given the opportunities of using bamboo for
energy
• The yield per hectare
• Can produce >500MW of renewable energy in
Kenya
• Need to create polices to favour biomass
based power generators
• Explored the development of PPP model for
bamboo biomass

7. Session 6: bamboo construction
• Shown how bamboo can be used for
construction
• There are published ISO standards
• The Ministry of housing is looking at reviewing
the Nation al Housing policy to advocate for
afforestation to ensure increased material
available that includes bamboo other than just
timber
• We were also exposed to initiatives of
bamboo used in construction already in Kenya