American based building and construction firm Innova Eco Building System, has been awarded the tender to construct a Ksh. 4 billion manufacturing plant at Mwale Medical and Technology City (MMTC), a community-owned sustainable development venture located in Western Kenya.
MMTC is an eco-friendly city in Kakamega County, currently in its final phase of development, which is set to be completed in 2020. Upon completion, it will serve as the home to 4,800 affordable green mid-rise residences which will be built on a 36-hole golf course.
It will also boast of having a state-of-the-art 7-tower 5,000 bed Hamptons Hospital and mall, a technology park, airport, convention center and a 144MW waste-to-energy power plant.
MMTC’s Innova factory will be the first of its kind in Africa and it is scheduled to begin the production of insulated magnesium cement panels in May 2019. Two additional production lines will be shipped to MMTC in 2019 and will push the production capacity to thousands of units per year.
Moreover, with its ability to mass produce panels on site at MMTC, Innova will achieve unparalleled economies of scale and cost savings on labor and transport, while simultaneously cementing MMTC as Kenya’s Lake region economic bloc engine.
According to Innova, via an official statement, the joint venture with MMTC will strengthen American relations in Kenya while providing Kenya with a viable alternative to affordable housing in line with the country’s Vision 2030 development targets.
“Innova’s technology is thus well-positioned to help the Kenyan government achieve its UN-backed affordable housing program, which seeks to build 500,000 affordable homes for Kenyans by 2022. By the end of 2020 Innova’s multi-million dollar factory will have tripled production and will have a capacity to meet more than half of the new annual housing demand in Kenya,” Innova said.
The announcement is furthermore aligned with American interests abroad, as outlined in the objectives of the US government’s newly created International Development Finance Corporation (IDFC), which seeks to enable the US private sector to compete globally with other players from China, and the rest of the world in infrastructure development projects all over the developing world.
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