A unique South African building system has been deployed in more than 20 emerging and developing countries to provider a faster and more affordable means of constructing low-cost houses, clinics and schools.
Among Moladi Building System’s latest contracts is the construction of 60 000 affordable houses for the Ghanaian government’s civil servants. The company is also providing funding and mortgaging solutions to facilitate affordable access to the houses as part of its value proposition that transcends merely building houses quicker and at a fraction of the cost than it would using conventional building methods. In partnership with a leading bank in Ghana, beneficiaries are being pre-screened to determine the size of the houses that need to be built and, in so doing, accurately defining the housing need in the country. This was previously not known by the Ghanaian authorities. A similar system will be rolled out in Mozambique and Namibia where Moladi Building System is also very active.
In Tanzania, the company is initially building 350 houses. They will be the new homes of communities that have been displaced by the construction of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline. Here, there is a shortage of more than 2-million houses. Meanwhile, it has also been selected by the Pakistani authorities as a viable solution for building many affordable houses for citizens of the country. More recently, Moladi Building System also secured a contract to build a house in Idaho in the United States.
“We have refined our processes since 1987 when we built our first house in South Africa. This was before the establishment of the National Home Builders Registration Council (NHBRC), so we had to then construct according to what I refer to as the ‘Moladi Standard’. This was a high yardstick that we established for ourselves already in those tentative years. Nothing much has changed since then apart from improvements made to our processes to bolster efficiencies and make construction more affordable,” Hennie Botes, Chief Executive Officer of Moladi Building Systems, says.
The company has bank approval and by implication this means that it is registered with the NHBRC and its technology certified by Agrément South Africa.
Notably, the company also won the Eric Molobi Housing Innovation Hub award for a house that it built in Soshanguve, Tshwane. The 52m2 house was completed in two weeks and at cost of R34 000. A Moladi Building System wall is about 60% more cost-effective than a traditional brick and mortar wall of the same size. However, the company won the award for passing the so-called “knock test”. It was a very durable structure that the community wanted to emulate in Soshanguve.
The system comprises a number of recyclable plastic modules that are connected together to form the mould of a house. These forms are then filled with steel, sand and cement, as well as an admixture that aerates to provide thermal properties and waterproofing.
As Botes tells Cape Business News, “I put a known cost of kilogram of plastic into a hopper. It goes through the barrel and is heated and melted to fill a mould with a specific volume in a predetermined time. When the mould is opened, I know exactly what it cost me to produce the product. We also know precisely how much the shell of the structure is going to cost when we fill the moulds on site.”
There is also no need to chase walls and to then replaster, while also eliminating stoppages in production due to delays in material deliveries. The system also eliminates typical errors, such as skew walls that have to be repaired by applying more plaster than was initially specified for the project.
However, it is also the job creation aspect of this system that has made it very popular in emerging and developing countries. About 34 unskilled employment opportunities are created for every house that is built using the system.
“Genius is simplicity,” Botes concludes. “You do not solve a growing worldwide backlog for housing by using conventional methods as this is part of the problem in the first place. We need more ‘superior building systems’ – as opposed to alternative building systems.”
