Uganda
Category: Social Housing & Community Living Year: 2023 Architects: Echale International Lead Architect: Julie McBride Design Team: Gretel Uribe, Marc Thorpe, and Juuko Kalinge Client: Echale Uganda Contractor: Echale International Photographer: Julie McBride
Echale is a housing development enterprise that has built and sold more than 50,000 durable, appealing, and sustainable single-family homes to low-income people in Mexico for 25 years. They are now transferring Echale’s know-how and ecoblock technology to developers in Africa to address the 50-million-unit shortage that will continue to grow if left unchecked. We are starting in Uganda where the current housing supply shortage is 2.1 million units.
In Uganda they are targeting underserved lower middle-class workers earning 250-350 USD per month, who are stuck in a cycle of paying half their earnings on rent for a substandard and overcrowded apartment in Kampala; and who cannot afford the average 40,000 USD price of a house that meets their requirements. Echale offers an opportunity to own a durable and environmentally sustainable single-family home that meets their requirements at 20,000 USD.
The design team for the Uganda house includes three architects: one from the Echale Mexico design team who has experience designing low-income housing with eco-blocks (Echale’s low-carbon compressed earth blocks), Gretel Uribe; an award-winning American architect, Marc Thorpe, to provide a modern design aesthetic; and a Ugandan architect, Jjuuko Kalinge, to provide contextual inputs needed to ensure product/market fit in Uganda.
The Uganda house was designed to meet the geographic, size, and aesthetic requirements of our target audience while keeping the build cost below 12,000 USD and the carbon footprint minimal. The primary construction materials are eco-blocks and other locally sourced materials that minimize costs and carbon footprint.
The 65 square meter houses will be built on plots of land that accommodate 20-100 houses and include shared spaces for community gardens and gathering spaces. Echale believes in the power of good design to create safe, healthy, and beautiful communities that enable more people to build equity in an asset that breaks the cycle of generational poverty. They plan to break ground with this project in July of 2023 and are seeking 350,000 USD to help them go faster so they can achieve their goal of 20,000 houses in sub-Saharan Africa in ten years.