Visit Ghana 2022: the real data
Visit of a construction site in a western suburb of Accra
This day didn’t go as planned…and that was good! In the morning I had a meeting with Winfred Quartey, again an entrepreneur we’ve met during a brainstorm in the Ghana Innovation Center two years ago. Since we were now looking for a local entrepreneur that could be the franchisee for the first production line and Winfred had been enthusiastic al the time and provided us with good information during our preparations, it was time for a new meeting and go through the ideas we had.
We met for an early lunch and afterwards Winfred took me to a construction site where we met an architect and constructor Winfred often worked with. There in the construction of that building it was easy to explain how unibrick would work as a building material and both the architect and constructor started thinking along. When they realised that they didn’t need to do the concrete construction works anymore, they realised the potential of the unibricks.
A detail of a conventional construction of a load bearing wall
The best way to compare the unibrick is to compare it with the main construction material used, which is the sandcrete block. This is building block generally made of a mixture of cement and sand in a ratio of 1:8. These bricks are cheap construction material, given the low percentage of concrete which also leads to a low load-bearing capacity. Basically they don’t go taller than one floor. For taller structures one needs a concrete structure that will be filled up with sandcrete bricks (as shown on the construction site we visited). They also told me about the normal process where, on site, the Sandcrete bricks are made, rather labor intensive, time and space consuming (pictures of a different site we encountered the next day are included with the pictures below). Although sandcrete bricks themselves are cheaper than unibricks but they also need the time of construction and the extra materials (mortar, concrete frame, casting), so it is important to get a grip on the square meter price per construction material.
A couple of days later we met online to go through the costs of a construction. This is quite a complex analysis since the two systems are only partly comparable and things like construction speed (in other words; labor costs) are hard to predict when no large unibrick construction has been made so far. Yet with all these safe assumptions, it turned out that for ground-bound constructions unibrick would still be about 15% cheaper and for taller structures, where a concrete framework would be needed, the advantage would go up as far as 30%… Again, all parties believed that these marges would be bigger in practice, but for now these numbers are very promising!
