Kenya’s Building Code Got Braver But Have We?

When the 2024 review of Kenya’s building code quietly opened the door to stabilized soil blocks, timber frames, and rammed earth construction, it did something more significant than most people realized. It admitted, officially, that stone and cement are not the only legitimate way to build a home in this country. For decades, that assumption sat underneath every planning approval, every bank valuation, and every insurance policy, even though it never made much sense for large parts of Kenya.

Take Eldoret. Hauling dressed stone into the town costs developers real money, and that cost gets passed straight to buyers. A family that could otherwise afford a three-bedroom home ends up paying for two, simply because the walls had to travel further than they needed to.

Stabilized soil blocks, made largely from material dug on or near the site, cut that transport bill dramatically. Rammed earth does something similar while offering thermal performance that concrete block struggles to match in the Rift Valley’s temperature swings. On paper, this is exactly the kind of regulatory liberalization that construction economists have been asking for.

So why does it still feel like nothing has changed?

The answer sits with the institutions that surround construction rather than the code itself. A building code can permit a material overnight. It cannot force a bank to lend against it, a valuer to price it fairly, or an insurer to cover it affordably. Those decisions move at an entirely different pace, governed by internal risk models, actuarial habits, and a fair amount of institutional caution that has little to do with whether the material performs.

Nowhere is this gap more visible than along the coast, where Makuti roofed homes remain a defining feature of Mombasa’s built environment. Makuti construction is not new or experimental. It has sheltered coastal communities for generations and, when properly treated and maintained, performs reasonably well against fire risk. Yet insurers continue to treat it as a high hazard category, often charging fire premiums that can rival or exceed those for a comparable stone structure. The result is a strange contradiction: the building code says this material is acceptable, while the insurance market says it is a liability. Homeowners are left absorbing that inconsistency in their monthly budgets.

This lag matters because insurance is not a footnote to construction decisions, it is often the deciding factor. A developer weighing stabilized soil blocks against conventional block work has to think beyond material cost. They have to think about whether a bank will finance the project, whether a valuer will recognize the asset’s worth at resale, and whether an insurer will offer terms that make the building bankable in the first place. If any one of those three says no, the cost advantage on paper evaporates in practice.

What should happen next is not complicated, even if it requires coordination. Insurers need updated actuarial data specific to Kenyan alternative building methods, rather than premiums inherited from generic risk tables built around timber construction in entirely different climates. Regulators who pushed the 2024 code changes should now convene the Association of Kenya Insurers and major underwriters to discuss what evidence would actually justify a change in fire cover pricing for treated Makuti roofing, rammed earth walls, and stabilized soil block housing. County governments, particularly in Eldoret and similar upcountry towns, could support this by publishing performance data from pilot projects already using these materials.

None of this demands that insurers abandon caution. Fire risk assessment should remain rigorous. But rigor and inertia are not the same thing, and right now premiums on alternative builds look more like inertia dressed up as prudence.

Kenya’s building code took a genuine step forward in 2024. It recognized that affordability and safety are not mutually exclusive, and that local materials deserve a fair hearing. The next step belongs to the institutions that finance and insure the buildings we construct. Until they catch up, the liberalization on paper will keep running well ahead of the liberalization in practice, and the families in towns that have for so long embraced alternative building materials like Kisii, Eldoret and Mombasa who stood to benefit most from the new building code will keep paying the difference.

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