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Demand for bricks kills the forests

child lost in forrest - Stock image
child lost in forrest - Stock image

Malawi's construction industry relies heavily on bricks - and the wood needed to make them is a major reason the country's indigenous forests are fast disappearing.

But an unusual home construction technique - using dirt or sand packed into plastic sacks and stacked - is now being tried out in Rumphi, in the north of the country, as a way to cut back on bricks and save what's left of the region's forests.

As part of the project, carried out by the Roscher Youth Development Centre with German backing, young people are being given technical and financial help to construct the environmentally friendly houses.

"We have lost a lot of trees and we still continue losing them, at a chilling rate. Our mountains and hills that had thick forests are now bare except for a few trees and shrubs," said Moir Walita Mkandawire of the non-profit youth development centre.

That loss of forest has led to more extreme weather and worsening droughts, he said, one reason the remaining trees need to be protected.

"The weather we have now is not the same like decades ago," Mkandawire said.

According to statistics from the Department of Forestry, Malawi has been losing about 1.6% to 2.8% annually of its forests to human activities.

But in February, Ronnnie Chirambo of the Department of Forestry, said the deforestation rate was now down to 1% a year, simply because there were too few trees left to cut down.

As the forests have disappeared, natural disasters - including drought, cyclones, landslides and floods - have become a regular and costly threat in towns such as Rumphi.

Heinrich Wegener of Support Malawi Heidelberg, which has provided technical and financial backing for the housing initiative, said he first heard about "earth bag" homes in 2012 while on a visit to South Africa. He felt the homes would be an ideal solution for Malawi.

"I researched ways to build houses with sandbags instead of bricks. My idea was to build an earth bag house as a prototype, working with the youth centre in Rumphi," he said.

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