Our vision for bamboo in South Africa is to increase its availability and develop affordable construction and housing systems.
Community Development
Bamboo is a labour intensive material and requires a mass labour force to be able to propagate, maintain, harvest, treat, craft and distribute. This means job creation. As the industry develops, value will be added to local communities through projects such as ablutions, schools, houses, and workshops aimed at skills development. Our vision is to build the future South Africa by cultivating the resources around us, whilst enabling the people around us. Bamboo is a commodity with a variety of uses, including export.
Product Development
We want to make bamboo a mainstream construction material, through Agrément certification. The Agrément certification process recently made it possible to use Compressed Stabilized Earth Blocks (CSEBs) in mainstream construction, which has in turn led to some landmark architecture in South Africa. Learning how to harness and use renewable resources makes it possible to combine earth and bamboo to create a resilient humanitarian infrastructure, as seen elsewhere in the world.
Ethics
Having to grow up, study and work in South Africa, we are vividly aware of the colonial and Apartheid history of this country. As such we are developing the Bamboo Regional Hub (BRH), a place where generated resources will be injected back into the bamboo farming communities in the form of essential and non-essential services such as toilets, houses, schools & learning environments, mobile offices, public community spaces and gardens, and so forth. We embrace partnerships with non profit organizations that have similar objectives and we are able to offer support to entities working with bamboo. We want to invest in, and strengthen our communities through this inclusive and dynamic BRH business model.
Renewable Houses South Africa (Pty) Ltd 2021