Kenya has an estimated housing shortfall of around 2 million units. Faced with this situation, the Kenyan government has set the production of affordable housing as one of its priorities with an ambitious National Affordable Housing Programme, and with it comes the potential to leverage a major shift towards more sustainable and resilient design and construction methods in the Kenyan building industry.

As part of a multi-disciplinary team, Bantu produced comprehensive green building guidelines for affordable housing, leveraging strategies at the system scale, site scale, building scale, and material and component scale.  Guidelines were developed to link explicitly to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their effects on the identified Planetary Boundaries, yet are contextualised by housing type, urban setting, and climate zones in Kenya to be locally relevant and impactful.  The green building guidelines then become a basis for revisions to the Kenyan national building code, which has not been updated in decades, and which creates an opportunity to make resilience and sustainability initiatives part a baseline condition of future construction and development.