Spending his days designing high-end residences for South Africa’s ultra rich, architect Tshepo Mokholo was miserable. Craving a change, Mokholo attended the influential Indaba Design conferencein Cape Town in early 2016, and listened to a pitch for the African Design Centre (ADC), a program seeking to shake up the highly unequal business of African architecture.
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“I was immediately sold on what they were trying to do and teach, and I felt they were taking an approach to education and architecture that was not readily accessible anywhere on the continent, maybe anywhere in the world,” said Mokholo.
Last summer, the first cohort of ADC graduates completed its inaugural 20-month fellowship in Kigali, Rwanda, with Mokholo among them.
The ten fellows, hailing from eight African nations, are now upending architecture, design and construction across a continent where rapid urbanization and population growth are presenting severe challenges to governments, with the needs of the poorest left unmet.
Their signature achievement is the Ruhehe Primary School in northern Rwanda, where more than 1,000 children now receive an education in a custom-built space, constructed almost entirely from materials sourced 150 kilometers from the site, and honed by builders, carpenters and masons from the area.
Local methods and talent
For Mokholo, “good architecture is a human right.” And with Africa’s urban population predicted to soar (a UN report in 2017 predicted that half of world’s population growth is likely to occur in Africa by 2050), it’s also needed urgently. By ADC estimates 100,000 clinics, 300,000 schools, and over 700 million units of housing will be required for all these new people.
A severe shortage of qualified architects and designers has left most sub-Saharan African countries lacking the homegrown expertise needed to build cost-effective infrastructure, and mushrooming slums already blight cities such as Nairobi and Johannesburg.