Formative scenario analysis of the factors influencing the adoption of industrialised construction in countries with high housing demand – the cases of Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Africa

Abstract

The use of industrialised construction can help meet the growing housing demand for developing economies in Africa. In order to understand future scenarios for accelerated adoption of industrialised construction, it is necessary to identify the influencing factors. To do so, this paper conducts a formative scenario analysis which is a literature- and expert-based method, focussing on three countries that have high housing demands, i.e. Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Africa. The resulting analysis consists of three parts. The first is the identification of nineteen internal and external influencing factors. These factors range from product performance to policies and regulations. The second is the illustration of the importance of each factor as a function of its relationship with the other factors. The third is the description of three possible scenarios the adoption of industrialised construction may take in the three investigated countries. The findings show that the most important accelerators for the adoption of industrialised construction come from governments’ commitment to invest in future construction and incentivize companies to adopt industrial construction methods and for these companies to produce competitive products. The specific adoption policies to be implemented, however, depend greatly on the specific situation.

Keywords:

• Industrialised construction
• housing
• developing economies
• formative scenario analysis

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge Jo da Silva, Marco Zumstein, Timothy Partl, and Tyler Pullen for contributing during the conceptualization and investigation phases.

Authors’ contributions

Author 1: Conceptualisation, methodology, investigation, visualisation, writing draft, and editing. Author 2: Methodology, visualisation, writing review. Author 3: Conceptualisation, editing, writing review, and supervision. Author 4: Editing and writing review. Author 5: Conceptualisation and writing review

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support provided by the Arup 2018 Global Research Challenge.