Current Project

Development and Promotion of Pre-fabricated Bamboo Module Housing to Provide both Income and Housing to Poor People

A Project funded by Blue Moon Fund, 433 Park Street, Charlottesville, VA 22902, USA

Project Period - 2 years

INBAR has recently been implementing a project entitled "Development and Promotion of Pre-fabricated Bamboo Module Housing to Provide both Income and Housing to Poor People" funded by BMF, USA. This project proposes to contribute to the replacement of unsustainable use of timber by promoting the use of environmentally sustainable bamboo resources. The main objective of the project is to develop technology and promote local industries producing bamboo based pre-fabricated module houses, which would benefit the environment, local building enterprises and families, particularly poor rural people, slum dwellers and homeless disaster victims who can't afford expensive houses.

The project will develop various prototype modular bamboo house designs in accordance with standards, costs, and uses in a range of climatic regions and will aim at different groups, i.e. primarily designs for disaster victims (emergency shelters), poor rural families and slum dwellers, but also for schools, small offices and houses for richer families. A pilot production unit will be established in China where different designs will be produced and tested. The results of the pilot production will be disseminated widely through different media and networks.

The project is envisaged to be the pilot phase of a much larger project, which will set up a modular bamboo housing industry in many more countries of the world. A large scale project proposal will be developed, involving many more donors and partners to replicate and optimize this approach to housing and income generation for the many countries of the world where suitable bamboo can be grown and good but inexpensive housing is urgently needed.

Background of the project: As a part of its mission, INBAR has been promoting bamboo for the construction of affordable housing to contribute both to poverty alleviation and environmental conservation. INBAR started its work with the non modular traditional approach. It has firsthand experiences of building schools with bamboo in Ghana and China, and the construction of affordable housing in Ecuador, Nepal and India. INBAR also collaborates with TRADA, UK and IPITRI, India to develop affordable and durable bamboo houses in India. INBAR has successfully transferred traditional housing technology from Latin America to Asia and from Asia to Africa.

The focus so far, however, has been on the use of bamboo culms in the construction of houses. Using bamboo culms for the construction has its own advantages such as low processing requirement, no need of initial big investments, versatile designs, elegant appearance etc. However, the efficiency of production is very low and the quality cannot be assured. Another disadvantage is high wastage of bamboos, as bamboo culms seldom come in same size and uniform diameter.

In order to explore the possibilities for developing the technology and associated logistics for the manufacture of prefabricated bamboo module houses as a profitable commodity based industry, INBAR initiated a pre-feasibility project in 2005 with the support of The Nature Conservancy/ Blue Moon Fund to develop bamboo based panel as a major building material.

Wood, steel and concrete have widely been used in many countries for modular housing. Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) for prefabricated housing have been extensively used in Europe, USA, Canada and Japan in the last decades. MMC is a new term intended to reflect technical improvements in prefabrication, encompassing a range of on/off site construction methods. For example, it is estimated that about 10% of new UK homes are built using timber frames, and 5% using other MMC, equivalent to about 25,000 MMC homes per year. In other European countries there is even a much greater use of MMC, particularly in Scandinavian countries and in Germany. In Japan 40% of new houses are build using MMC.

As to the materials used for MMC, currently the most common are steel, concrete and large quantities of pre-engineered timber and wood based panels. Wooden roof trusses I-joists, and walls/partitions have been traditionally important prefabricated components. Bamboo based panels have similar properties to the wood based panels. The potential market for bamboo used for MMC is very promising.

The pre-feasibility project developed a prototype prefabricated module panel house in PR China. All the wall panels and roof components were made of laminated bamboo panels and tested in the laboratory for its performance against the Chinese building standards.

An international workshop was conducted in November 2005 to disseminate the results of the project. The participants of the workshop were very much interested in developing engineered bamboo modular houses at industrial scale. The workshop concluded with a resolution to prepare a project to develop various designs and technologies for making such modular bamboo houses to suit with various environmental conditions and income groups of tenants/house owners.

The main advantage of the industrial development of modular houses is that they can be pre-fabricated in large quantities and can easily be transported to building sites. INBAR's experience until now indicates that the bamboo pre-fab house units could be efficiently transported as so-called 'flat packs' and assembled quickly. Such technology would be highly relevant in particular for relief agencies for disaster management.
Besides the benefits of a quick supply of houses in large quantities, the development of a bamboo based modular housing production chain would also directly benefit bamboo growers, harvesters and employees of the building industries by generating direct and indirect employment and linking them with industries in pre-processing and processing of panel components. It would also develop long term rural-urban market linkages. Last but not least, modular houses based on bamboo rather than wood could save thousands of hectares of forests.
Goals and Objectives of the project

The long-term goals of the project are

• To provide more people with affordable good quality housing, in particular poor people in slums and people who have lost their houses due to disasters
• To promote environmentally sustainable bamboo resources as an engineered construction material and thereby to contribute to the replacement of unsustainable use of timber.
• To contribute to poverty alleviation by providing employment to local communities producing bamboo by making them part of the industrial production chain of modular bamboo houses.

The immediate goal of the project is to develop medium and large-scale pro-poor industries to produce high quality and low cost engineered bamboo modular houses for both private and institutional markets through linkages between the business sector, governments and international aid agencies.

The general objective of the project is to develop technology for making engineered bamboo modular houses for different uses and target groups and to identify the stakeholders and potential donors for a large scale development and implementation project.

Demonstration Site: The demonstration of the developed prototype houses will be done in the base owned by the forum for environmental journalist (CFEJ). The houses will be used by the forum and the demonstration site will remain permanent.

Project's Long term strategy

The project will develop the technologies of bamboo modular houses and will test and validate them for maximizing their design properties. Various outreach activities will be carried out to disseminate directly the technical results, such as workshops, demonstrations, exhibitions, an electronic forum and communications through partners.

At the same time the project will develop a long-term large scale network of partners and stakeholders to promote the use of bamboo as a main construction material within a pro-poor production chain. Right from the start INBAR will engage aid agencies and governments in the development phase of the prototype houses, to ensure that the designs fit with the requirements of emergency relief and institutional uses (slum dwellings, schools), and to link the relief agencies and governments to the business communities and CBOs who will form the production chain to produce such houses in the future. Together with this network INBAR will develop a large follow-up project to disseminate and upscale the results of this feasibility project and negotiate this new project with the international donor community.

The long term strategy will involve CBOs, business communities and governments. Local community based organizations and business communities will mainly be involved in the production of houses that will serve to both private and institutional markets. Governments will be linked to the production chain stakeholders for institutional markets such as providing housing for disaster victims and for slum dwellers and schools. INBAR will facilitate the link between government and business sectors for establishing institutional markets. In addition, Governments will be involved in replicating such projects in their countries in the future as part of the follow-up project.