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 one hundred people gathered on 31 October 2024 in the Mpazi neighbourhood of Kigali, Rwanda. Authorities, architects, diplomats, industrialists, entrepreneurs, and SKAT’s project team came to visit the newly completed buildings and to attend the closing ceremony of the PROECCO project, which was implemented on behalf of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).
In the previous years, more than 2,000 workers have replaced 207 small mud houses with durable, multi-storey urban buildings. These now offer a wide range of 782 row houses, apartments, shops, rental studios, workshops, offices, and several bistros for the local community, while relocating families from Kigali’s risk-prone, steep hillsides.
The Mpazi neighbourhood represents the most visible outcome of the PROECCO project’s inclusive urban transformation approach, developed by SKAT and its partners in Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo over 12 years. This approach comprises guidelines and tools for participatory urban (re-)design, alongside an affordable construction system for multi-storey buildings, locally known as the “Swiss Cube”.
These pre-engineered modules, or “cubes”, can be freely customised and enable small local contractors to build safe urban blocks in a nearly unlimited number of configurations.
To meet the rapidly growing demand for modern bricks required for Swiss Cube buildings, SKAT has invested significant efforts in expanding and decarbonising the local construction materials industry. The private sector has adopted SKAT’s technologies at a much larger scale than initially anticipated. Since the Swiss Cube’s first presentation in 2017, the production of modern bricks has increased by 1,100 percent, from 5 to 58 dwellings per day, reaching a market share of approximately 50 percent.
As of 2024, these producers reduce more than 100,000 tonnes of CO₂ emissions every year – a figure that is expected to double once all plots in the Rwamagana Eco-Industrial Park, developed under the PROECCO project, are occupied by certified green factories.