00:00It can clean your teeth and help fight landslides.
00:04Bamboo.
00:06A plant with many talents.
00:09And it can help store carbon from the atmosphere,
00:13restore degraded land,
00:14and protect vulnerable hillsides from erosion.
00:17The steep slopes of Vahiga County in Western Kenya.
00:22Here, heavy rains regularly wash away fertile soil
00:26and trigger landslides.
00:28It is a challenge that farmer Victor Mwanga has been dealing with for many years.
00:34It's so sloppy.
00:36In some areas, you are actually at a gradient of about 60-70 degrees.
00:43And this is a heavy rainfall area, so we receive so much rainfall.
00:48Kenya is prone to landslides.
00:51In April 2024, a flash flood caused devastating landslides
00:56that killed around 50 people.
00:58As climate change drives more frequent and intense rainfall,
01:02many communities are now looking for ways to protect vulnerable hillsides.
01:07Victor Mwanga has been doing just that since 2012 by planting bamboo.
01:13It develops a dense underground system that helps anchor fragile soils.
01:19And it takes only about five years to reach maturity.
01:24If it was not for these bamboos, all these would be prone to soil erosion.
01:29It would have lost a lot of soil here.
01:31It would have caused siltation in the springs.
01:37Some of the springs would even have disappeared because of the heap of soil that is washed into the valley.
01:44Mwanga believes the planting of the bamboo has resulted in more water running in this stream.
01:52It provides for him and his neighbors.
01:56The roots form like a mesh. A mesh and a sponge.
02:00So when it rains, instead of the runoff, this mesh acts as a sponge.
02:07It's able to store this water, absorb it, and then release it slowly.
02:12And that is what now protects most of these water catchment areas.
02:17It is not only in Kenya. It is a trend across Africa.
02:22Governments promote bamboo as a nature-based solution for land restoration and climate adaptation.
02:28Bamboo has been planted along vulnerable river banks and flood protection dikes in an effort to reduce erosion, runoff, and
02:38flooding.
02:39But some bamboo species produce seeds only once every few decades.
02:45To speed things up, scientists take tiny pieces of bamboo tissue and grow them in the lab.
02:51Now, a single plant can be multiplied quickly into thousands of seedlings.
02:56Now, when we have these natural seedlings from tissue culture, we are taking from the shoot induction to planting the
03:05field.
03:06It takes us three to four months.
03:09Bamboo is not a one-size-fits-all solution.
03:13Some species can become invasive, spread aggressively, and destroy the balance of an ecosystem.
03:20Choosing the right species is key.
03:24The bamboo that is ideal for our situation is the clamping type of bamboo.
03:31So clamping means they grow together in a group of stems clustered together. So they grow in a cluster.
03:42The two sounds, they are very different. That is young. That is mature.
03:50That sound tells Victor which stems are ready to harvest.
03:54Their next stop is his factory, where 67 people turned bamboo into everyday products.
04:01In 2019, Kenya officially recognized bamboo as a cash crop, hoping it could create jobs and new sources of income.
04:10So you're in an industry, you're trying to learn things, to prove to the market that whatever you're producing is
04:15the best.
04:16So it's a nice feeling. Everyday you learn, everyday you're inventing something new.
04:23There you go, you have a straw.
04:27So this is mostly used by entertainment joints, where they make dawa, and you use this as a straw.
04:37So then, just by doing that, you're already eliminating the use of plastic.
04:43The stems become products. The roots stay in the ground.
04:48For Mwanga, that is bamboo's promise. A harvest he can sell, and the soil he can keep.
