40 former university students from Nigeria, Tanzania and Swaziland have built a solar-powered smart house that will be made available to African housing markets soon.
Donald Chidera Abonyi and the rest of the team of professional architects and engineers designed the eco-friendly smart house called the Jua house.
Jua house was originally designed by the team for the Solar decathlon Africa which was organised by the US Department of Energy.
About the Jua House
On the surface, it is not easy to know that the house is built with recycled shipping containers.
Using recycled materials to build keeps it in line with the sustainable development goals of Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure because it allows shipping ports to find economical use for their containers.
The house is also designed to have uninterrupted power supply by being 100 per cent solar-powered.
According to Abonyi and his team, the Jua house can be built in two weeks and the size can be made to fit the client’s need.
The design of the house is essentially African. It adapts the North African housing features of an inner space with access to sunlight.
“For the exterior, we adapted Northern African architecture.
Francis Fotsing Sadeu
For example, it has a patio, an open space inside the house that allows natural ventilation and improves daylight,”
The house is designed to be sustainable by itself, it does not use more energy than it produces and is built with eco-friendly materials which take climate change into account.
Considering the epileptic power supply in Nigeria and other parts of Africa, the Jua house is a viable solution for the continent, especially since it is designed for the middle class which implies affordability.
The eco-friendliness of the house makes it relevant in African tech, because more solutions and innovations that affect the climate positively are in demand.
That said, this is just a prototype. Currently, business research and development is being done to ensure that the Jua house is put on the market in Africa by 2020.
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