KuNa
House of Nature
Over 1 million people in Nicaragua are homeless. KuNa, in Mayan Yucatec “House of Nature”, is a bamboo social housing program managed by the communities of Chontales, Salinas de Nahualapa and El Astillero. Casa Congo’s mission is to create a bamboo based economy that empowers the community to design and build their own homes using local, regenerative and high performing materials.
So far we have…
Trained 60 farmers in bamboo silviculture
Trained 12 carpenters in bamboo construction
Established a bamboo pilot plantation
Built 1 prefab workshop and storage facility
Built 1 temporary treatment and drying facility
Integrated bamboo in Nicaragua's building code
Sunk 40 tCO2e
Built 21 homes for homeless families
Supported over 300 indirect beneficiaries
We established a complete bamboo value chain, from farm to wall, and the local community now has the tools and skills to procure bamboo and build more homes independently.
Project Highlights
In 2021/2022, Casa Congo launched KuNa and built the first 21 bamboo homes, using over 4000 poles of Angustifolia Guadua bamboo that were harvested in Chontales and transformed into prefabricated engineered housing solutions in El Astillero’s workshop.
The project seeks to leverage bamboo as a building material to deploy resilient housing solutions at an efficient budget that will allow our program to compete with traditional building techniques such as concrete, steel, zinc and blocks.
KuNa was a prize winner in the Architecture in Development 2022 Global Challenge.
After Nicaragua was struck by two category four hurricanes, Eta and Iota, tens of thousands of people were left with almost nothing. These hurricanes from late 2020 highlighted a broader issue around Nicaragua’s housing crisis, which counts over 1 million people living without adequate shelter and with less than $3/day.
According to research from IADB, Nicaragua is the country in Latin America with the highest housing deficit. Moreover, there is a significant lack of affordable building solutions that can be locally sourced in a sustainable way.
In this strenous context of climate disasters and poverty, there is hope: BAMBOO.
KuNa was a truly multi-disciplinary and international team effort that involved many private and public organizations.
A critical part to the mission was the arrival of Don Oscar Ruiz. Don Oscar is a Colombian farmer with over 40 years of experience in bamboo silviculture who came to Nicaragua to train the farming cooperative in Chontales and handover his knowledge to Dona Rita, who led the local bamboo harvesting efforts and supplied over 4000 bamboo poles in 3 months.
Thanks to our alliance with Tacuara, Casa Congo formed a team of carpenters comprised of local men and women who saw KuNa as an opportunity to learn about bamboo. This team later self proclaimed themselves as “Equipo Construyendo Suenos” – the Team Building Dreams.
Casa Congo partnered with ANF and INVUR to select the beneficiary families and lead a participatory design process to ensure the house design was driven by community inputs.
We then built a material processing and prefabrication workshop in El Astillero, within a 2km radius from the future homes. Casa Congo engineered a standard building solution made out of 150 poles / home and trained a team of experts to be able to manufacture and install 1 home in just 1 week!
The project came with many logistic challenges, but the pueblo rallied together to make it happen… the Nicaraguan community is now ready to take the bamboo industry to the next level!
“Thank You Casa Congo for helping me build my family's dream. This has been a challenging but life changing experience from which I’ve learnt so much”
Iumar, Bamboo Carpenter