Driving Inclusive and Low-Carbon Housing for Africa’s Growing Cities
Our inclusive urban transformation mechanism and modular house design are progressively reshaping urbanisation in one of Africa’s fastest growing cities, while creating jobs and reducing emissions.
An illustrious group of a hundred people gathered on October 31st in the Mpazi neighbourhood in Kigali, Rwanda. Authorities, architects, diplomats, industrialist, entrepreneurs and SKAT’s project team came to visit the new buildings and to attend the closing ceremony of the PROECCO project that we implemented on behalf of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). During the past years, more than 2000 workers have replaced the 207 little mud houses with durable urban multistorey buildings, offering a large variety in the 782 row-houses, apartments, shops, rental studios, workshops, offices and several bistros to the local community, relocating families from Kigali’s risk prone steep hillsides.
The Mpazi neighbourhood is the most visible face of the PROECCO project’s inclusive urban transformation approach, which has been developed by SKAT and its partners in Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo during the last 12 years. Our approach comprises guidelines and tools for participatory urban (re-)design, and an affordable construction system for storied buildings, locally called the “Swiss Cube”. These pre-engineered modules (cubes) can be freely customised and allow small local contractors to build safe urban city blocks in a nearly unlimited number of variations.
To meet the fast-growing demand for modern bricks (required to build Swiss Cube Buildings), SKAT has invested significant efforts into the growth and the decarbonisation of the local building material industry. The private sector has invested in SKAT’s technologies at much larger scale than expected. Since the Swiss Cube’s first presentation in 2017, the production of modern bricks has grown by 1100% from 5 to 58 dwellings per day, reaching a market share of about 50%. Today, these producers reduce more than 100.000tCO2 every year - a figure that will likely double, once all plots in the Rwamagana Ecoindustrial Park, developed by the PROECCO project, will be be occupied with certified green factories.
SKAT maintains its presence in Rwanda, to support this process, and to spread this experience and knowledge across the African continent.