KEBS to pay for construction standards upgrade

Kenya Bureau of Standards (Kebs) will foot part of the Sh250 million bill to adopt building standards used in Europe.

Kebs Managing Director Charles Ongwae said the organisation will take up part of the bill from its budget but called on industry stakeholders to chip in.

The shift to the European standards known as Eurocodes is supposed to kick in by 2021 after the Government sanctioned its adoption to replace the British standards that have guided the country for half a century.

Work was supposed to start last year, but budgetary constraints have made it difficult to roll out training.

“We need about Sh50 million a year for the next five years. We were supposed to start last year but we have already lost that one year so there is a need to start off the training,” Stanley Shitote of Moi University said.

Building capacity

The funds will go into building capacity from European experts who have already adopted the standards as well as domesticating the Eurocode with local annexes attached to the European template.

The Chinese have already translated the Eurocodes to Mandarin and Prof Shitote says this has given them an edge in global construction business as a result of adoption of the standards.

“You see what we are looking at is, say, wind speeds. They are different in every geological area so adopting the Eurocode without changing to local specifics may mean that the standards are expensive,” said Shitote.

Kebs expects builders to adopt the initial Eurocode standards including concrete, steelworks and basic structural design.

Currently, Kenyan construction workers and consultants are using the British model which was abandoned for the Eurocodes.

However, Shitote notes that increasingly the players in the industry have been transitioning to new models including European standards for composite soil blocks.