Low-Carbon Construction in Uganda: A Conversation with Eco Concrete’s CEO Apollo Buregyeya

Interview with Apollo Buregyeya CEO and Founder of Eco Concrete Limited Uganda.

Could you give us a brief introduction about yourself and about Eco Concrete Limited?

I am Apollo Buregyeya, a civil engineer that specialises in construction materials. I founded and run a company called Eco Concrete Limited. The company is focused on three pillars. First, the construction of high-rise buildings. Secondly, the research and development of construction materials as products. We manufacture concrete blocks, pavers, and, recently, a low-carbon type of cement called geopolymer cement. And the third function is developing ICT solutions because we appreciate that African commerce narratives are different from European narratives, so buying off-the-shelf ICT tools does not work well for Africa.

Eco Concrete has made a significant mark in the construction industry by promoting sustainable building practices. Can you tell us more about the company’s founding vision and how it has evolved since it started?

Eco Concrete was registered in 2016, and I founded it after travelling the world and seeing how Europe, Southern Africa, and Asia were approaching construction. I saw a gap, because there was a pressure to imitate models from the developed world, which were expensive for the African market. Consequently, I felt that we needed to develop a new system of doing things, where we approach procurement in four different stages: separating material requirements, labour requirements, technology tools, and the administration costs of projects. We risk the project, and then focus on what is important, which is normally materials.

If you compare Europe and Africa, when somebody is putting up a house in Europe, 60-70% of the cost is in labour and 30-40% is in materials. When you are putting up a house in Uganda, apparently 70-80% of the cost is materials, and labour is very cheap. And so, we initially said, let us revolutionise that by cutting the meat into pieces and discover where the problem is. We independently focus on materials and labour, and by doing that, we communicate well with our clients, reduce the amount of risk, and we are able to deliver cheaper infrastructure.

Sustainability begins from the baseline of accessibility. If I cannot access a house, I cannot start talking about how sustainable my infrastructure is going to be. Also, when we break down these components, we find that labour and materials are locally sourced. So we start looking at local, low-carbon, and affordable materials, which when integrated with our approaches in construction, we tend to be very competitive in the market.

Sustainability has become a core value in many industries today, including in the construction industry. How does Eco Concrete incorporate these eco-friendly practices into the products and processes?

It begins with knowledge. We are sufficiently knowledgeable about the requirements of being sustainable. We also appreciate that sustainability does not have the same definition everywhere. It changes with region. For example, if I pick a sustainable material in China and I am able to ship it into Uganda, by the time it reaches Uganda, because of the carbon footprint of transporting it and handling it and other cost implications, it is no longer sustainable. And so, we choose to be local, to generate materials locally and to quantify the footprints. Additionally, educating the teams that we work with, to give them knowledge about keeping our materials low carbon, making sure that they are sustainable in a manner that is durable.

By “durability” I mean that when a material is in service for a longer period of time, giving nature time to heal itself. You do not want to be going back every year to extract materials to put up new infrastructure, so we emphasise the issue of durability. Now, yes, good materials, well-treated materials, low-carbon materials, but at the same time, planning well to make sure that these materials are protected within the total shape and structure and detailing of the infrastructure that we put up.

Uganda has a rapidly growing construction sector. What are some of the challenges and opportunities you see in the market, especially when it comes to companies focused on sustainable solutions?

You framed the question well, by placing the challenges and opportunities together. Where you find a challenge, that is where the opportunity lies for you to fix with your innovation. We face three levels of challenges, which are also opportunities, and the first one is the regulator challenge.

There is good regulation and the structures are in place, but people are not empowered to enforce the regulation. As a result, you find that there are a lot of risks when we undertake construction. Inconsistency in the quality of construction materials will attract over-design so as to increase the safety factor, resulting in high construction costs. While that is a challenge, it is also an opportunity because if I have a new material that does not have a standard, a new innovation, then it gives me an opportunity to accelerate the application of this new material and put it on the market. And by the time the regulator comes in, it has a history of performance and we can use that data to prove that the material works.

The second level is that of skills. As a developing economy, infrastructure is still growing and, to quote Aristotle, “What you do not know, you must learn by doing.” Most of the things we are doing, we are doing for the first time, and therefore we do not have a skills market that we can draw from to quickly implement projects efficiently and win every time you try. So there are a lot of risks and stress on the management team to make sure that things go right.

The third difficulty is that of inherited standards. Europe is a very high-carbon region because it used European standards, and these are standards we are inheriting. We are importing from Europe to help us implement infrastructure on our continent. And if we are going to achieve that level of infrastructure in Africa, like it is in Europe, then we are going to cook the planet. The planet is going to boil up, because Europe has already proved that. When the World Bank, IMF, and other global partners only release funds based on these European, high-carbon standards, we do not get the freedom to look at our African commerce structures and locally available materials, and to respect why we are still a low-carbon region. The per-capita carbon footprint for most of Africa is below 1 metric tonne.

We need to respect that, and also try to attract industrial skills towards applying local African materials, to make sure that they are also held in dignity, standardised, and lifted in value to participate in commerce. We are chasing something that is already chasing us, which is high carbon and sustainability, which is going to be a problem, so we need to reflect deeper on the standards.

All things considered, our commerce is growing and the market is opening up. We are seeing new, private clients and a lot of foreign direct investments coming in to develop infrastructure for the local markets, so it is a very good time for our business.

Could you share with us some of the latest innovations or technologies that Eco Concrete is implementing to reduce environmental impacts?

Going back, having the understanding that Portland cement, the traditional cement we use, is actually a British cement. It is European cement. It is a high-embodied carbon and energy cement. To make the traditional cement, you need to burn limestone. Limestone is a rock that has carbon dioxide that was trapped a long time ago. You have to burn it up to temperatures of 1,500 degrees Celsius. Now, that is a lot of energy, and so the product you make is a very high-energy product. It is also trapped carbon that gets released. That for every kilogram of cement you make in sub-Saharan Africa, you are looking at about 0.9 kilogram of carbon dioxide gas. That is too much gas emitted, and so we needed to have a different type of cement. A cement that is going to avoid embodied energy, a low-energy cement, because the cost of energy in sub-Saharan Africa is so high because of the limitations of energy infrastructure. We looked at different materials during the creation of a low-carbon, low-energy cement, and we developed a different type of cement that we call geopolymer cement. It is based on volcanic rocks as the base material, which we activate, and we are able to make very good cement that has more productivity and more strength when we are using it in blocks compared to traditional cements.

The other approach is removing the Eurocentric model of infrastructure development, and this is what we call the climate-resilient rural homestead designs. Eighty percent of our people in Uganda are in rural areas. The economy in Uganda is not centred around urban industry, rather it is a rural agricultural economy – coffee and tea farming, and mining – and so, we are looking at a package where we develop rural homesteads that are functional and that are climate-resilient. And then we use the model where we take part of their productivity, what they produce at a homestead level, to recover the cost of investment.

That is process innovation. While the material innovation is the low-carbon, low-energy cement that is being used in the development of these rural homesteads, so you find you have a net-zero carbon infrastructure and we are not increasing the carbon footprint of the globe.

In your view, how can the Uganda construction industry better promote green building projects? And what role does Eco Concrete play in driving this change?

It begins with knowledge. We need to appreciate that it is urgent that Uganda and Africa actually provide the leadership when it comes to sustainable construction, when it comes to low-carbon materials and low-carbon construction approaches. It is very important that we start that with the knowledge and appreciation that we are already below the Paris threshold of 2.3. Uganda is at 0.2 metric tons per capita, so we need to legitimise our [Unintelligible 17:55] life. We need to legitimise our commerce processes when it comes to infrastructure development and make sure that we standardise and improve them so that we do not repeat the European infrastructure mistakes. We have to have infrastructure. We cannot escape that, but we have a chance to do it better.

What are your strategic plans for the growth of Eco Concrete Ltd in Uganda and beyond?

We continue to push the ICT agenda because, with artificial intelligence, construction is going to be data-driven. It will be cheaper when we apply AI in construction, and AI can only be enabled by data. Data that is relevant to us and not data from developed nations. We intend to use the tools that we have – one of them is called Tofali – to gather information on construction processes so that we can apply AI in them. That should reduce the cost of construction, but also give more value to developers because information is stored and tracked.

We are also expanding in construction because, with our approach to construction, we are more competitive. It engages the clients, and they are actively involved. We have a lot of owner-builders in Uganda, and so we enable them to participate and we de-risk their participation because we are professionals. We enable them to go into the market to buy materials, because the process of buying construction materials is not technical once they have been specified.

We are also scaling well with our green cement project, which comes in with our go-to-market strategy of developing rural homesteads. With the production of the green cement, in the next five years, we should have covered 100,000 rural homesteads that are developed and connected with ICT technologies.

Do you have upcoming projects or partnerships that you are particularly excited about?

Yes. For the cement factory we are putting up in Rubanda, for the green cement, we have partnered with a company called Concreet Projectmanagement from the Netherlands. We are partnering together to make sure that the factory is established, functional, running, and they are coming in with some management expertise that will help us take off. It is going to be our first time we are putting up a cement plant, so we are learning as we develop the cement plant. And I am excited that we should be able to shorten the learning curve by partnering with people who have the competency.

As a leader, how do you ensure your team remains motivated and aligned with the company’s long-term goals, especially in a competitive and challenging market like the construction industry?

There is a lot of informality at Eco Concrete. We run a horizontal structure, where everybody, including the guard, can access me. In that informality, we are able to communicate in detail the company goals, break them down to tasks and milestones, and make sure that each person understands what they are supposed to do. Every Monday, we meet, and we have an open accountability. If we have people on site, they are also going to connect in via Zoom. We have that conversation and each person echoes back the tasks they have to perform in that week. There is freedom for team members to participate in what they are going to do. And once it is developed and agreed upon by myself and the team, then they go ahead and implement it, which gives them fulfilment.

It begins with knowledge, so there is a lot of teaching. That an individual engaged in any project is going to be trained and taught so that they understand the whole perspective. The why is very important, not just the implementation. On the tasks, we have four-column weekly goals that contain your goals, your partners in achieving the goals, and how success is going to look like. We tend to make sure that things are clear so that people know what they are supposed to be doing.

What sets you apart from your competition?

I have taken time to acquire this knowledge and exposure, and so I am openly honest with my clients. As a result, they are able to trust me, because I explain the why and why not, sometimes refusing ideas as I explain my “why” for the way I do things. I seek to help my clients. I do not engage in projects that are not designed to be successful. The important part, for us, is that the project has to have been prepared to succeed after it is completed. If it is something that is vaguely planned, we communicate to the client that we cannot do it, giving our reasons.

Also, we have the knowledge to cut the project into smaller pieces and separate them into different components – materials, labour, technology – and administration costs. We are able to tell the client that the risk is in material, which is normally 70-80% of the budget of the construction, and they cannot carry this risk as it is going to be expensive after costing. And it tends to happen that, because of supply and demand dynamics, the risk is never there. The prices of cement are going down because new companies are coming into the market, and so the client is able to provide the materials as we focus on our core competencies, which is labour and technology, and then administration. The client also, at the end, knows how much money they have put in the project, so they value the projects that we do for them because they participated in their development. It is not something external or artificial.

What drives you to do what you do? What motivates you when you get up in the morning?

I grew up in the village and came to the city when I was 19. Then, at 24 years, I travelled abroad and endured attacks on my dignity, common among people from my race, during unpleasant airport experiences, and it made me desire to see development back home. As a result of this, all my projects are purely about developing my own people. When you come from a place that is not developed, when you are behaving badly at home, it is not the problem of those people who did not give me dignity. It is a problem of where I came from, because when you come from a dirty place, nobody is going to invite you to the table. It is going to take effort.

And so, the drive is to make sure that I spread myself to cause development. The principle is that tall trees are found in a forest. You cannot find a very neatly grown tall tree standing alone, so I cannot even pause to say I am going to be very successful alone. No, I want my success to have impact so that I may be one of those tall trees and be accepted as an equal partner.

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