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Shaping more resilient housing strategies: The Kenya affordable housing green building guidelines
June 4th, 2025
The development of green building guidelines for the Kenya Affordable Housing Programme (AHP), funded by Agence Française de Développement (AFD), sought to leverage an anticipated major public investment in the construction of hundreds of thousands of housing units to precipitate a green shift in the entire design and construction industry.
Through engagement of private and public stakeholders, including the State Department of Housing and Urban Development as the primary public entity, a larger affordable housing study led by Espelia utilised ground-up household surveys run by GRET and SDI Kenya to create a profile of housing schemes and types which helped shaped a response to the status quo and created the foundation for reshaping a response. Using this as foundation, and in consultation with various public and private entities involved in design, urbanism, and sustainable development, Bantu Studio developed the Kenya Affordable Housing Green Building Guidelines to aid in, and be flexibly applied to, the rollout of affordable housing programmes.
Because myriad sustainability tools, rating systems, and codes already exist (with minimal uptake), reworking these to present yet another toolkit was seen as ineffective. Systemic change is unlikely to come from tinkering with technical details of design alone; in the age of the Anthropocene, more holistic and interconnected considerations are needed, but professionals are not always keenly aware of the contributing roles they may play as a small piece of a much larger sustainability puzzle. For this reason, the guidelines were developed to explicitly link overarching goals and frameworks, utilising the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their effects on the identified Planetary Boundaries as entry points into design thinking. These are then contextualised by housing type, urban setting, and climate zones in Kenya to be locally relevant and impactful.
The framework of the guidelines relies not on categories of sites, uses, types, or other classifications typically used in built environment regulations, but on flows of decision making across scales of influence. It roughly follows a normal affordable housing project workflow, starting from the positioning of housing within the larger urban and ecosystemic environments, to maximal uses of the site, to the passive design strategies of buildings, to the considerations of future uses, adaptability, and sustainability of components. At the same time, it identifies common building types for affordable housing in Kenya, their design considerations, and variations based on the various climate zones in the country. Part 1 of the guidelines introduces these base-case conditions and climate zones, while Part 2 uses considerations and adaptations to the base-case to organize guiding principles, strategies, and flexible/ adjustable actions by scales of influence rather than by categories of building elements.
The guiding principles begin with the System Scale, which considers the relationship between a building or development project and the urban and ecological systems that surround it. This scale focuses on sustainable urban planning and ecosystem protection, covering aspects related to the development’s location with respect to density, to existing infrastructure and land uses, to natural habitats, and to blue and green infrastructure. Zooming in, the Site Scale focuses on the unbuilt space within a plot and how the placement and massing of building(s) within it affect the use and performance of buildings and sites. It focuses on site layout and landscaping to address critical ecosystem services and minimize maintenance while maximizing comfort of the unbuilt spaces within a plot. The Building Scale addresses architecture and design considerations, focusing on climate-adaptive performance, efficiency, a building’s capacity to adapt over time, and overall passive design strategies. At the smaller end, the Materials and Components Scale looks at the elements and materials that make up the building over a complete life cycle, from extraction to manufacturing to methods of assembly which make disassembly, reuse or recycling possible. It focuses on selection of regenerative materials, embodied energy of production processes, and sourcing from sustainably managed supplies, and encourages adaptability and flexibility in building assemblies to facilitate changes for future use.
Overall, the guidelines are intended to be both a reference manual for design and a roadmap for project planning, goal-setting, and positioning of the Kenyan housing sector within a sustainable trajectory. Users may find multiple entry points into the guidelines, and may utilise either all or small parts of the guidelines as they become relevant to their role in delivering affordable housing. It is hoped that the document continues to adapt over time, as new and better methods are discovered, and greater opportunities unearthed.
While these guidelines were designed more from a technical standpoint of the built environment, the driving factor is to shift delivery of housing to attract green finance from sources such as green bonds, sustainability loans and dedicated climate funds. The Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) has introduced the Kenya Green Finance Taxonomy (KGFT) to help define which economic activities including construction can be classified as green and thereby attract institutional investments into sustainable projects. The KGFT, alongside the Climate Risk Disclosure Framework, aims to guide the financial sector toward a low-carbon economy by providing a structured approach to identifying and classifying environmentally sustainable activities. While this output did not review the KGFT or dive into quantifiable metrics to measure resource efficiency, carbon footprint and related cost savings, it is a starting point to work closer with other stakeholders towards actual delivery and implementation of a greener agenda for affordable housing, which will help mitigate long-term climate and regulatory risks, thereby enhancing project resilience and investment attractiveness.
Kenya Affordable Housing Green Building Guidelines
