The Road Ahead..

BCP Interlocking BlockWerks is a very new company that specializes in the production of a new type of high performance Interlocking Soil Stabilized Block in Ghana. Our goal is to revolutionize the construction industry in Ghana, and later the rest of Africa by aggressively pushing the adoption of BCP Interlocking Blocks for all our building construction needs, in order to dramatically reduce the cost of construction and rapidly improve the standard of living on the African continent. 

BCP Interlocking BlockWerks was born out of a mixture of immense frustration that not enough was being done to tackle the rapidly growing housing deficit both in Ghana and in the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa, and also the feeling that there simply had to be a technological solution to such a technical problem in an age where human ingenuity and constant innovation affects and transforms so many aspects of our lives, almost at every turn, I felt a common building shouldn't cost as much as it does today. If we human beings have figured out a way to do things like drastically reduce the cost of space rockets thanks to SpaceX, completely change the way we commute in cities thanks to Uber, and use electricity to power our cars without compromise, then I was certain the same could be done for construction.

 I believe strongly that the only way we can construct the massive amount of housing units we need in Ghana in the relatively short time period we need them in, is if either the price of land or the cost of construction reduces drastically, or both, and since the price of land is never coming down, barring a catastrophe, we're left with figuring out a way to drastically reduce the cost of construction as the only way to tackle the alarming trend of high construction costs, high cost of land, rising rents, a rapidly growing population, and intense Urbanization all at the same time. Our standard of living on the continent is already far lower than the rest of the world, and our rapidly growing metropolises are going to turn into overpopulated dumps with highly visible income inequality in full view due to the harsh contrast between the wealthy living in their expensive condos while the average citizen can barely afford to live in a single room with shared amenities and poor sanitation, if we don't do something now...

This is where BCP Interlocking Blocks come in, use of our blocks reduces the cost of building construction in Ghana by up to 70% in many cases, and increases the speed of construction by up to a ridiculous 600x for wall construction compared to old-fashioned cement blocks. The huge savings are possible mainly due to the nature of Interlocking Soil Stabilized Blocks in general, the dramatic reduction in labor costs, the almost complete elimination of mortar waste at construction sites, the rapid speed of construction, and the reduction of most of the money that goes into the transportation of materials to construction sites. And because BCP Blocks interlock together like Lego’s instead of needing a cement mortar mixture to bind them to each other, there is no need to buy sand, cement, and water in the large quantities we do today, or even pay for the labor required to mix and apply mortar in the painstakingly slow way we do today. In addition to saving on those materials, the speed with which a house can be built is truly astonishing as an average sized 2 bedroom house with kitchen, bathroom, and living room, can be built in a matter of days with minimal skilled labor required using only about 4,500 Blocks.

There are still even more savings to be had when we consider the fact that interlocking blocks do not need to be plastered or painted, and are already smooth and fair-faced, thus eliminating the need for all the expensive cement and imported paint we use today just to beautify a home. At $8 per bag of cement in Ghana today, plastering is prohibitively expensive yet absolutely necessary when using the old block and mortar method of construction. Eliminating the need for plastering saves you all the costs of sand, cement, water, and labor you would have had to pay with the old block and mortar system, but even more importantly, when a mistake is made on a project, instead of breaking everything and starting all over again, wasting large sums of money in the process, with interlocking blocks, the mason simply rearranges the blocks, costing you nothing for his mistake.

PS. (It costs anywhere between $150 and $200 per ton for sand in Ghana today, most projects usually require several trips of sand, a major cost you get to save if you use interlocking blocks for your projects).

Currently Ghana has a 2 million housing deficit or shortage of housing units and yet because of the challenges stated above, is currently supplying about 50,000 housing units per year, which clearly is nowhere near enough to have a meaningful impact on our deficit. At 50,000 housing units per year, it would take Ghana 40 years to build 2 million units, and the population isn’t standing still, it's still growing rapidly, for example Ghana has 2.3 million people between the ages of 20 and 24, and has 2.6 million people between the ages of 15 and 19. A total of almost 5 million people that are already working adults and many that will be joining the workforce in the next 5 years, they all need places to stay in our cities which by the way rank among the highest in the world today in urbanization rates growing at 4.5% annually. Foreigners are pouring in as well, both from Western countries and from our neighbors in the region like Nigeria, and the francophone countries, like Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast; and together we are all competing for rental spaces, and as a consequence, pushing up the price of rent across the board, because the supply simply cannot match the demand.

To make it all worse we are not building the type of housing units that a very large portion of the population needs, which in my opinion, are apartment buildings. Too big a percentage of the less than 50,000 housing units Ghana builds annually goes to glitzy, million dollar, high-end houses and villas that the average Ghanaian cannot afford, all while a whopping 46% of our housing stock are still Compound houses (Almost HALF!) compared to a paltry 4% for Apartments. Obviously those numbers need to switch places as soon as possible if Ghana, and all of Sub-saharan Africa is going to tackle this issue effectively.

At BCP Interlocking BlockWerks, we believe that adopting interlocking blocks as quickly as possible could as much as quintuple the amount of housing units we build per annum to more than 250,000 from less than 50,000 currently. More than halving the cost of building a home today has enormous benefits on it's own, but increasing the speed with which we can build them combines to give us the technological "hack" we've been waiting for. Ghana and the United Kingdom have roughly the same land area size, but the United Kingdom is populated by more than 2.5 times more people, and Ghana is heading in that direction rapidly, can we afford to build up the housing stock that the British have in the coming years, at the price of construction today? Of course not, not unless we leverage technology and innovation in order to do even better than they have at a fraction of the cost. 

This time instead of just talking about it, lets just do it... and there has never been an easier time to do so than now..

Bissa Crown Prince Nikeamah Dabre.