he philosophy is a radical departure from how many construction projects are run. Worldwide, the words “construction industry” are more likely to evoke troubling news than optimism. In the past month, the origin of many migrant construction workers in earthquake-ravaged Nepal has led to questions about how rebuilding in that country will occur. Even before that tragedy struck, work conditions that killed one worker every other day on World Cup-related construction projects in Qatar led to a global outcry.
Rwanda stands apart from that debate; the hilly central African nation is neither a departure or arrival point for many guest construction workers. It also deviates from broad trends in sub-Saharan Africa, where hastily constructed, overcrowded slums often offer economic survival at the cost of health and safety. Instead, the government of this small country has tirelessly advanced education, health and development — while enforcing strong limits on the changes citizens can initiate themselves. “There aren’t even large slums in Kigali,” reads a 2013 New York Times article on the politics of Rwandan development. “The government simply doesn’t allow them.”
But the uncommonly tidy capital implies nothing about wealth, and underdevelopment lingers. The typical Rwandan lives on less than $1.50 a day, and Doran describes many who rely on informal ditch-digging jobs to earn that wage. Poverty constrains construction, which is often also completed with precariously employed day laborers. Meanwhile, architecture — the art and philosophy guiding all of construction’s sweat-won achievements — is nearly nonexistent in Rwanda.
“When we enrolled in the architecture program, we honestly didn’t know what architecture was,” a graduate of a 2013 Rwandan university architecture course admits in the 2013 book Afritecture: Building Social Change. “We had to search on the Internet to find the definition.” Over a century after Sullivan first wrote that “form follows function,” traditional wattle-and-daub buildings dot much of the country’s green hills in lieu of formally designed structures.