Terraced crops climb the slopes of every mountain in northern Rwanda, continental Africa’s most densely populated nation. Nearly every speck of arable land is taken so people push into protected forests — and each other. Land scarcity contributed to Rwanda’s genocide in 1994.
When presenting our work on reducing embodied carbon in our projects in Kigali, we?re often asked some version of the question: ?You can do that in Rwanda, but how can this translate to a developed context"?
The simple answer is that at this point in time, all places around the globe have much in common. COVID-19 has revealed just how much our industry?from developed markets in North America to land-locked emerging markets in Africa?depends on a global network of material and labour exchanges. Our projects in Rwanda have faced the same delays and material shortages as those in Boston, most notably with specialty items related to electrical and water infrastructure, manufactured in Southeast Asia. Fortunately, construction on our Kigali-based projects resumed largely unimpeded after an initial eight-week shutdown. This was a direct result of actions taken by the Government of Rwanda to manage the pandemic, along with early design decisions to source the vast majority of materials and labour for our projects in-country. After a decade of working in this manner, our Kigali office has become deeply familiar with the materials, processes, and people that it engages. As a result, our p...