Cemforce. Our New Best Friend!

Dave Still, who works for Partners In Development, a South African Engineering firm who reached me through the sanitation online forum ecosan put me in touch with Wicus at a company in Kimberley known as Cemforce, as they were producing prefabricated loos doing something similar to what we were aiming for. Cemforce had started off with housing, moved into latrine production, and had recently gone back into housing, with 5 prototype houses using the same panels used for the toilets.

This all sounded pretty familiar! I was originally sent by EWB-UK to South Africa to work with an NGO called Esibayeni on a low-cost housing project. When I arrived I found that the project was still just on paper. Since we were starting from scratch, I thought that it would be a good idea to concentrate on trying to build latrines first, which would be much easier, and give us some experience of the manufacturing a construction material before moving onto housing. I was pretty encouraged by the fact that Cemforce had gone along the same lines.